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Heavy Metal Thunder French Black Metal

Genres Heavy Metal Black Metal (First Wave) Second Wave (Norwegian) French Black Metal

French Black Metal

Secretive, hand-dubbed and genuinely unsettling. Later, in Deathspell Omega’s hands, the most intellectually serious black metal anyone has made.

Active years
1993 – present
Origin
France (Paris)
Family
Black Metal
Bands here
12

Before you press play

Explicit content

Graphic lyrics and artwork are a defining feature of this genre rather than an occasional accident — which of violence, gore or sex depends on the band. Worth knowing before you put it on in a room with other people in it.

Start here

Four records in order of how easy they are to get into — which is not the same as best first.

  1. Memoria Vetusta II: Dialogue with the Stars Blut Aus Nord, 2009

    The way in. Vindsval swaps the usual murk for something closer to shoegaze — long, melodic and almost serene, with the tremolo picking used as texture rather than attack.

    Listen to Memoria Vetusta II: Dialogue with the Stars

  2. Vampires of Black Imperial Blood Mütiilation, 1995

    Les Légions Noires proper: recorded on nothing, distributed on hand-dubbed tapes, and genuinely unpleasant company. The lo-fi here is not an aesthetic choice so much as a circumstance.

    Listen to Vampires of Black Imperial Blood

  3. Cut Your Flesh and Worship Satan Antaeus, 2000

    Faster and cleaner than the LLN records and considerably more hostile. This is the sound of a band trying to make an audience leave.

    Listen to Cut Your Flesh and Worship Satan

  4. Si Monumentum Requires, Circumspice Deathspell Omega, 2004 The landmark

    The hardest listen in black metal and the last rung for that reason. A theological treatise on evil, arranged as ninety minutes of riffs that refuse to resolve, by a band who have never played live or given their names.

    Listen to Si Monumentum Requires, Circumspice

What it sounds like

Hand-dubbed, half-audible and genuinely disturbing. The Les Légions Noires tapes were made on domestic equipment and circulated between about a dozen people, so the guitars are a distant hiss, the drums are a rumour, and the vocals sound like someone weeping into a microphone in another room. Nothing is melodic. What separates it from Norwegian lo-fi is that the Norwegian bands wanted to sound evil while these ones sound genuinely unwell. Deathspell Omega later took the country somewhere else entirely — dissonant, immaculately recorded and theologically serious — and the two French strands have almost nothing in common but a border.

  • Heaviness 3 out of 5
  • Speed 3 out of 5
  • Aggression 5 out of 5
  • Technicality 2 out of 5
  • Darkness 5 out of 5
  • Melody 1 out of 5

Where the name came from

'Les Légions Noires' (The Black Legions) was a secretive collective of Parisian black metal musicians active in the mid-1990s, who named and self-identified themselves. The LLN produced deliberately lo-fi, occultist recordings distributed as hand-dubbed cassette tapes, rejecting all commercialism. Bands like Deathspell Omega, operating outside the LLN proper, extended the French BM legacy into the 2000s with a more theologically complex approach.

The bands

Hear these first

  • Deathspell Omega France
  • Blut Aus Nord France
  • Mütiilation France
  • Vlad Tepes France
  • Antaeus France

And 7 more

  • Belkètre France
  • Darvulia France
  • Torgeist France
  • Aosoth France
  • Merrimack France
  • S.V.E.S.T. France
  • Arkhon Infaustus France

Where it happened

Counting this genre and everything descended from it.

  • France French Extreme & Atmospheric Metal 5 bands

If you liked this

Closest in sound outside this family, leaning towards the similar or the gentler rather than straight into the deep end.