Tonight It’s a World We Bury: Black Metal, Red Politics. 
Bill Peel, Repeater Books, £10.99 

A YOUTUBE rock and metal music reviewer once observed that there were two types of heavy metal. The first was often found on radio and accompanying car commercials: bands like Judas Priest and Black Sabbath. The second is “screamy scream upside-down-cross pentagram face-paint naked chick blood-spatter” metal, otherwise known as black metal. 

Emerging from the late 1980s, black metal was over-the-top, offensive, and in extreme opposition to the societies in which it first flourished. Typified by superfast blast-beat drumming, heavily distorted guitar and screamed vocals, the lyrics often dealt with satanism, nihilism, violence, and the stage craft included a lot of black leather, chains, “corpse paint”, spikes, skulls, bones and pigs heads. It’s the music of horror movies by artists who seemed to take it very seriously, and if you got into it your parents would  seriously consider taking you to both a priest and the police.  

Originating among various bands including Venom from Newcastle and Bathory from Sweden it was Mayhem, the leaders of a prolific Norwegian scene that, by the early 1990s, inspired arson attacks on a series of Norwegian churches. 

Mayhem’s lead singer (stage name Dead) killed himself; his bandmate Euronymous was murdered by fellow artist Varg Vikernes of Burzum. These early years were depicted in the book Lords of Chaos, and later an excellent 2019 film by former Bathory drummer (and Madonna video producer) Jonas Akerlund. 

In short, it’s not what you’d automatically think of as being a bit of a lefty scene. Indeed, there are a number of bands practising in the subgenre National Socialist Black Metal (NSBM for short). But Bill Peel, an aficionado of the entire genre with a background in anthropology and literature, argues that, in fact, black metal is an ideal medium for waging the cultural struggle for communism. 

To do this he examines five thematic qualities of black metal: distortion, decay, secrecy, coldness and heresy. 

Distortion starts with the guitars which Peel sees as barriers to the commercialised culture industry, but also as an approach which creates differences and opens the door to further development. 

Decay (and death) are recurring themes in black metal, and can also be described as the state of present capitalism: destroying and leaving to decay economies, communities, and environments. Yet for a number of bands, and many more by implication, decay also leads to new life and renewal. 

Many black metal musicians are shrouded in mystery: fame is antithetical to the genre. Pseudonyms are ubiquitous, some musicians are simply not named at all, a significant amount are never photographed or depicted realistically, others create false identities and rumours. These practices and traits allow musicians to operate from the shadows and secrecy allows it to gather strength in organisation. 

The snowy landscapes and blizzards celebrated by black metal provide its coldness — inaction rather than action, and storing energy in inertia are clearly counter to the heat and energy required by capitalistic production, and like heresy provide a direct opposite to the values of capitalistic society.

Peel’s case in this work is to provide a detailed landscape view of where this genre easily fits into the model of opposition to capitalism at its basics. 

Occasionally it’s a stretch into some of the more specialist ends of cultural studies, and he intentionally doesn’t review the many subgenres including the RABM (Red/Anarchist Black Metal) subgenre, nor go into the more recent work of bands like Zeal and Ardour known for mixing black metal with African spirituals. 

Nonetheless Tonight It’s A World We Bury is a manifesto for developing the strengths of the genre for socialist cultural growth and oppositional change. 

It is also fascinating introduction to the cultural world of black metal for those both within and without. There is much value to be had in opening ears, looking up and listening to the bands and songs mentioned within while reading. 

Black metal comes across as a destructive cultural force, but it is also one that resonates with revolutionary thought, opposition to the world as it is, and, as Peel says, can be wielded as a weapon.