Dark Romanticism and the Aesthetics of Cascadian Black Metal

In 2024, I was invited to write something for Kohlhammer's upcoming publication Meta/Metal; Open Questions in Metal Studies, and this is the essay I sent them.

Introduction

It’s not a coincidence that I became a fan of black metal when I moved to the Pacific Northwest of North America. I wouldn't be surprised if you did too, or would, if you visited for long enough. To live in a place like the Pacific Northwest is to be constantly overwhelmed by the relationships, interdependence, and consequences of your microcosmic presence in a place that is not only larger and more intricate than you could ever fully comprehend, but one that will happily swallow you alive. Ecological, cultural, and industrial systems are so densely interconnected here that you cannot isolate any single active agent without the whine, drone, ripple, or crash of another. The colour palettes of clothing, art, craft, music, and design match the landscape here– raincloud grey, ocean black, peatbog brown, moss green. The Pacific Northwest has a vibe, and we call that vibe Cascadia. The natural world permeates every aesthetic you can imagine here, and the region’s Cascadian subgenre of black metal music is no exception. Black metal’s brutal and unforgiving ‘wall of sound’ is right there in scarred granite, rising in craggy, stratovolcanic spires from the thrashing tidal coastline. The writhing guitars echo over streams laden with spawning and dying salmon, between cedar boughs so heavy with dew and moss their needles scrape through stone. The devastation in the lyrics reverberates across fading glaciers, rips through swathes of forest burned black by wildfire, calls out in anguish to raven, eagle, bear, wolf, mountain lion, and orca. 

Cascadian black metal is mostly synonymous with the overarching American metal subgenre of atmospheric black metal, but gets more specific about the region of the continent it comes from, given that the aesthetic goals of Cascadian black metal are referential and inseparable from the ecological and biological qualities of the Pacific Northwest. From a black metal perspective, the Pacific Northwest could be characterised as a terrifying and wondrous land of tsunamis, aurora borealis, avalanches, earthquakes, eruptions, conflagrations, impenetrable mist, tidepools, decay, teeth, fur, and claws. It’s not the panic-inducing tarantula-in-your-sock-drawer kind of mortal terror that characterises places like Australia, nor the apex-predators-lurking-behind-every-boulder threats of sub-Saharan Africa (both great places for death metal, in my opinion). I’m talking about a place where we can all do our own thing with relative success, as long as we understand its relational and ecological boundaries. Look! There’s a grizzly bear down the path. It’s doing its thing. Hey! Overhead is a bald eagle, and it’s doing its thing. That’s not to say that a Jaguar leaping out of a tree in Thailand to rip your face off and eat it isn’t just a jaguar “doing it’s thing,” there are complex food chains and ecosystems in other bioregions inhabited by humans around the planet. However, when speaking of how one might characterise a place, the Pacific Northwest has a reputation for being epic, dramatic, murky, dense and dangerous, but also relatively safe for humans, and even desirable for some of those same reasons; it’s a taste of the old sublime. In this place, we are not cultures that crave danger or tolerance out of necessity, but we do like to feel part of something much bigger than ourselves, and at times, be awe-struck by it from a relatively physical and emotional safe distance. We push up to the edge of that wild unknown and get cosy, maybe make some tea. Having a lifestyle that is still integrated into the natural world is a shared desire by many communities in this place, and a key aspect of the regional cultural identity here. On an individual or familial level, however, frontierism is still a deeply held pastime and continued practice. Many European settlers hold a romantic idea about this place as somewhere to rediscover one’s own identity, and to measure themselves up, facing the elements alone, relying only on the ingenuity, sufficiency, and strength of the self. They want to create the life they always wanted out here, not the life that was forced upon them back east. Much like the early black metal musicians of Scandinavia in the 1980’s, many Pacific Northwesterners want to follow their own rules, not be responsible for anyone else, or to answer to anyone else. In the old romantic, chivalric sense, this place allows for the true test of man– to measure their might and will against the unforgiving wilderness and assert their righteous sanctimony in bushcraft and acreage. It’s no wonder there are so many reclusive and moody White people out here– an eclectic mix of tech billionaires and oil tycoons, first-gen hippies and boomer homesteaders, Libertarians and White supremacists, incels and sadboys, primitivists and neo-pagans, all exalting the ghost of Ted Kaczynski. Black metal fans too. I know, it’s complicated.

There is an inherent sadness and loneliness to the Pacific Northwest. It could be the depressive winter months of endless rain, the apocalyptic wildfire haze of late summer, the inescapable endpoint of a once terra incognita at the edge of the Pacific ocean, or the isolating effect of this place as a Plutonian satellite of Western civilization’s Atlantic homestar. The gloominess of the Pacific Northwest carries an irony to it though, because you could just as easily note the paradisiacal aspects of the region. Picture it: the coastal temperate rainforest rises from the Pacific, blanketing the snowy peaks of the Cascade Range. Areas of that forest have been cleared to build cities, towns, and rural communities, some right along the ocean. Cloudless blue skies, comfortable humidity, and perfect air temperatures grace the late spring and early summer months. The bioregion boasts unique flora and fauna unmatched in vibrance and beauty. The trees are always green, the wildlife always in abundance. The cities are multicultural and high class, bringing global cuisine, festivals, and fashion. In a single day, you could surf in the morning and snowboard in the afternoon. It is a veritable Garden of Eden for anyone wishing or forced to live outdoors year-round. The appeal of this place subsequently brings with it the extremes of wealth and poverty, liberalism and conservatism, diversity and intolerance. Geographically, culturally, and politically, the Pacific Northwest is a mixed bag, incredible and terrible, beautiful and tragic. You’ll see a similar characteristic dichotomy from Scandinavian black metal musicians living their dark, tortured existence among glorious wildflower-laden fjords speckled with colourful rural cottages. Our melancholy heroes too-often suffer through real and psychological starvation surrounded by limitless bounty. I suppose the deepest kind of love is always haunted by sadness, and testament to familiar quotes like “no life without death,” “no darkness without light,” “happy as a pig in shit,” “eat the rich,” etcetera, etcetera. I suppose if this were an opportunity to characterise the Pacific Northwest and black metal as experienced things that use the idea of death to remind us of the sanctity of life, then black metal is basically a sonic, gothy version of skydiving– cheating death, when successful, in an extreme way to reaffirm one’s own existence. Sad people really get after it out here.

The appeal of the Pacific Northwest, much like the endeavour of black metal, is an escape to an alluring and foreboding wilderness, and the ensuing disappearance within it. I’m not alone in fantasising about being overcome by this place, and daydream a personal lore about how someday, when the melancholy shroud of endless gloomy days and the sadness in my heart for the fleeting but indescribable beauty of the world finally reaches the centre of my soul, I will finish my coffee, put down my book, don my hiking boots, and walk into the old-growth forest, never to be seen again. Black metal has always carried these anguished, yearning, and mournful inclinations in its music. This is the shared sentiment between Cascadia and black metal– the desire to express strong feelings about the natural world too mysterious and enveloping to name, and masked by an atmosphere of misery, vitriol, fantastical terror, and intolerable noise, call them into physical existence; to summon them as one might summon demons. By turning the feelings into form, a physical reversal of existence also takes place: the human body dissolves, no longer needed, and we become one with the trees and rocks and waves. This is a desire to shed our individual shells, to be integrated into the communal flesh of the planet through some soundlessly peaceful or cosmically horrific process– collapse and natural decay, spiritual transcendence from corporeal form, or piercing a veil to another realm. The only way many of us can imagine that kind of integration is through a ritual of physical eradication, which on the surface looks like anathema, self-disgust, and suicidal ideation, perhaps on a planetary scale. We haven’t figured out what happens after the body dies, but faith remains in there being a rapturous afterlife for the conscience, free of the burdens of earth. People of all religious and spiritual inklings pray to the god of their understanding for this. The mind wants to endure after the body is gone. It’s not a particularly healthy fantasy, given the autoerotic amnesty it so-often grants from our planetary transgressions, but fantasies elicit pleasure, and we want to feel pleasure. 

Perhaps we abhor this beautiful place because we cannot live forever in it. The unrelenting wilderness of the Pacific Northwest is a deadly place to get lost in, but we yearn for those final steps that lead us from the safety of civilization, much like we feel an urge to leap when standing at the edge of a precipice. The Pacific Northwest in all its splendour is the ultimate temptation; a new frontier for the death drive. We’re not supposed to enjoy provoking our own demise, but we love to be tempted. We’re not supposed to enjoy black metal either, but my Spotify Wrap data would tell you otherwise. 

Before I get into idiosyncrasies of the Cascadian black metal genre, I want to explore some of the historical influences and modern perspectives that could explain why we feel the way we do about this place called Cascadia. Along the way, it should start to make sense how black metal is such a natural outgrowth of those feelings. I’m going to get into subjects like natural disaster, westward expansion, landscape painting movements, the dark side of Romanticism, eco-theosophy, and the torturous ecstasy of melancholy.

Side A, let’s go.

Cascadia and the Promise of Ecological Cataclysm

To understand the character of this place, you first need to understand its geography. Cascadia, which I’m using interchangeably for the most part with Pacific Northwest, is classified as a megaregion of North America, stretching primarily along the Pacific coast’s stratovolcanic Cascade Range.^[1] From its southern edge in northern California up through Oregon, Washington, and most of British Columbia in Canada, Cascadia’s perimeter is defined by the watersheds of the Fraser, Snake and Columbia River, and thus includes parts of Nevada, Utah, Idaho, and Montana, and even makes its way into the Yukon territory and Alaska at its northernmost point. From the Pacific Ocean to the Rocky Mountains, any land above the arid southwest is probably considered part of Cascadia. There’s even a bioregional independence movement from the 1980s that persists, seeking to form their own country of Cascadia by partitioning their land from the US and Canada, with Seattle as its capital.^[2] Long before the Cascadia independence movement, a smaller region of the Pacific Northwest spanning California and Oregon’s border attempted to secede from America, calling themselves the State of Jefferson.^[3] Even today, many Indigenous nations of the Pacific Northwest assert that they never formally ceded their lands to what is considered now to be the US and Canada, and maintain that no treaties were or are valid. This means we live on stolen land, and not just in a cultural and racial sense. The bioregion of Cascadia has a long and fraught history of its residents being colonised, controlled, and oppressed by authorities they did not choose, and who wish to be independent and recognized as such. Societies that are predominantly White, progressive, new-agey, weekend-warrior technocrats may populate cities like Portland, Seattle, and Vancouver, but the spirit of resistance is still alive and well, and the black metal scene is one example. You could probably argue that any hotspot of historical resistance anywhere in the world has a thriving metal scene, but that’s for another essay.

In New World colonial history, North America has told a story about itself that romanticises the West. The settler impression of the west coast of North America and the Pacific Northwest in particular has always been a vision of pristine, unbroken, and uninhabited wilderness, with towering snow-capped mountain peaks, wild and crystalline rivers carving their way through parched canyons, climax forests with canopies rising hundreds of feet into the clouds, and a cast of furry, clawed beasts roaming the misty hills and hollows of a place forgotten by time. This place, however, still carries within its affect the notion that the natural world will never wholly submit to human control; that even in moments of otherwise pure transcendence, the wilderness taps your shoulder with a pointy claw. In his seminal book My First Summer in the Sierra, naturalist John Muir describes a morning where he climbed to the top of Indian Canyon in Yosemite, and was rewarded with an unforgettable view of the valley below. “Never before,” he proclaimed, “had I seen so glorious a landscape, so boundless an affluence of sublime mountain beauty.”^[4] Muir goes on to tell that, being so awestruck by the natural splendour of the mountains and rivers and waterfalls that lay before him, he let out a cry of pure and unadulterated joy, which happened to startle a large brown bear nearby. For Muir, the situation is somewhat ironic, but also creates a paradox because pleasure and fear are manifested from two aspects of the same environment. Spoiler for both, I’d imagine. Muir’s reflection on that experience helped shape the American perspective on wilderness in the late 1800’s. To Muir, God still had some humbling surprises, and one’s we wouldn’t like, although that’s not a notion that makes it into national advertising, unless you’re Catholic I suppose. Still, an unexpected bear is all it really takes to remember that the planet has limitless ways to eradicate human life, possibly forever, and go on evolving just as it always has. 

If a startled bear isn’t enough to whet your whistle, then let me also tell you about the Cascadia subduction zone: the Pacific Northwest’s apocalyptic coup de grâs. You can probably guess its whereabouts by the name, but here we go: seventy miles off the Pacific coast and stretching over 700 miles north from California to Alaska, the Cascadia subduction zone is a fault line that dwarfs the San Andreas. There’s a one-in-three chance that it will erupt in the next fifty years, and when it does, buckle the fuck up. “When the next full-margin rupture happens,” explains Kathryn Schulz in her New Yorker piece The Really Big One, “that region will suffer the worst natural disaster in the history of North America, outside of the 2010 Haiti earthquake…” FEMA projects that when it rips, 140,000 square miles of North America’s west coast will either be shaken to pieces, buried in lava, drowned by tsunamis, or burned to ash. Portland, gone. Seattle, gone. Vancouver, gone. Victoria, you guessed it– gone. Seven million people will be affected, 13,000 dead, 27,000 injured, one million displaced.^[5] If that’s not one of the most metal things our planet could do, I don’t know what else to tell you. 

This paradise called Cascadia has claws. And night vision. And volcanoes. And buckling tectonic plates. Pretty cool, if you ask me, and definitely worth throwing some devil horns at. Humility and perspective can reveal themselves in unexpected ways– be it stretched out over a grand horizon, lurking in the bushes beside you, or obliterating the world you once knew, the wild is ancient, boundless and alive, and wonder and fear are but two small ways we can feel about it. Cascadian black metal shares this sentiment, and if it makes you want to stand on the shoreline and welcome the skyscraper tsunami wave when the subduction zone pops off, then it’s working. 

The Sublime in the American West

Think of a cover of a black metal album, and there’s a good chance it has an epic landscape on it. Metal has always been inspired by sublime landscape art, and much of that art depicts rugged, mountainous terrain, or deep, dark forests– natural places that stir the imagination and get us feeling grizzled, outcast, and heartbroken. American settlers have always been spellbound by the idea of the Pacific Northwest, and long before the arrival of the photograph, artwork in the tradition of romantic and sublime landscape painting in Europe has advertised the geography of the American West with a familiar grandeur and atmosphere of the classic peaks and pastors of the Old World. Going West was going home, but with a fresh start. Politics and conquest often take the spotlight in how we investigate why a place is the way it is, in a social and cultural sense, but here I’d like to offer up art as a contender too. Art in terms of design, language, colour, shape, sound, and form are all influenced by the surrounding geography, just as much as they are by technology and industry. That specificity eventually leads us to a visual and felt characterization of somewhere, which can be evoked simply by the name alone: Switzerland, Thailand, Delhi, Nepal, Athens, Cairo. Accordingly, the Pacific Northwest has its own unique visual character coding. We have learned a lot about the look of these places through artwork depicting them and are brought closer to them by the artwork from the places themselves. Much like how an album cover takes you to a place, the music in turn speaks from it.

Thomas Moran, a prominent landscape painter of the time, first visited Yellowstone when he joined the Hayden Geological Survey of 1871. The team spent 40 days surveying and Moran’s resulting paintings helped establish the region as the first national park in 1872.^[6] With a majority of his paintings depicting the landscape of the American West, the effect of Moran’s painting style entertained the popular notions of beauty in landscape: grandiose scale, snowy mountain peaks, robust waterfalls, and trees shrouded in fog. But Moran didn’t stop there– he supercharged the paintings with dramatic colour, light, and shadow, translating the vast, incalculable power of nature into a seemingly spiritual, or religious presence. Similarly, much of the metal music genre relies on supercharged sound to create a dramatic atmosphere, through roaring and screaming vocals, electric guitars, double-bass drums, fast tempos, and peripheral noise, which too brings moving stories and landscapes into the imagination. These depictions of epic psychological experiences within wild places, I believe, is a very accurate definition of the sublime.^[7] Metal music and sublime landscape paintings both imagine scenes of heightened drama- storms, battles, floods, fires, death– all satisfying the more dangerous side of natural phenomena. “Because [the paintings] were connected with ideas of ‘pain and danger,’” explains art historian Michael J. Lewis, “they produced the most intense of emotional responses. This was not mere titillation… but a profound encounter with objects whose immense magnitude and implacable severity overwhelms us with despair at our own puniness and insignificance.”^[8]This could just as easily explain the emotional response metal fans get from their favourite songs. I can recall choruses and breakdowns in metal songs that have made me feel as though I was posed at the edge of an abyss in a lightning storm, bearing witness to the rise of some fierce, cosmic, chthonic entity. Some songs have carried me off to an otherworld beyond time, communing with fae spirits and celebrating in the great halls of long-dead warriors. Other songs have cracked open a demon inside my own body, transforming me into a hulking beast with an insatiable bloodlust. I’d get so pumped I feel like I could kick the fuckin’ walls down. I know you’ve been there too.

Whatever grand notions were stirred up by John Muir–a man of deep religious faith, searching for and finding the God of his understanding in the rocks and trees and animals of the world–his passionate writings contributed to a movement in the American West among writers, artists, and wealthy adventurers. The landscape of Muir’s Sierras, and numerous journeys in the West captivated adventuring writers like Henry David Thoreau and Washington Irving.^[9] On a tour of the western prairies, Irving recounts being “overshadowed by lofty trees, with straight, smooth trunks, like stately columns; and as the glancing rays of the sun shone through the transparent leaves… [he] was reminded of the effect of sunshine among the stained windows and clustering columns of a Gothic cathedral.”^[10] Gothic iconography and design has always been a popular theme in metal music, as it calls to mind a spiritual past, overtaken by nature, left forsaken, and forgotten by time. Faith aside, it’s easy to see how the ruins of an ancient cathedral will always stir something in those who listen to metal.

Sublime landscape paintings in the 19th century American West reached their consequent end state in portraying the infallible, and solidly Christian perfection of the natural world, but to allow the sublime only to luxuriate in the religiosity of the natural world is not enough. Muir was obviously conscious of the dangers around him, and would in numerous writings and letters home to his wife reiterate the romance he saw in falling victim to the dangers of the wild. In My First Summer in the Sierra, Muir recalls the restless night he experienced after descending Yosemite Falls in his bare feet, which could easily be mistaken for Cascadian black metal lyrics: “Again and again I dreamed I was rushing through the air above a glorious avalanche of water and rocks. One time, springing to my feet, I said, ‘This time it is real—all must die, and where could a mountaineer find a more glorious death!’”^[11] It’s a romantic sentiment, but also reinforces the glory of self-destruction. Under this criteria, nature is only a vehicle of spiritual deliverance, which designates wilderness as being in service to humanity and not much more– as if the sharp face of Yosemite’s Half Dome only existed to have the stairway to heaven carved in it. It’s worth interrogating the modern perspective that landscape art is ‘sublime’ if it only portrays the geographic features needed to sustain human life and find God. What needs to be made clear is that the sublime is not simply classic natural beauty and the manifestation of holy ground, but something more real, something hidden beyond the human experience. It’s something much darker, more thunderous, and sounds like crashing cymbals.

Let’s continue on Side B.

Dark Romanticism and the Call to Fantasy

Since the American sublime landscape movement was unable to separate itself from the spiritual and nationalistic motives that inspired it, we must look elsewhere for a darker perspective of that time in history. Our redeemer comes in the form of American Romanticism, alternatively known as Gothic or Dark Romanticism (as I will refer to it henceforth). Authors Edgar Allan Poe and Herman Melville were among others in the mid-19th century to offer sobering responses to the budding perfectionist ideals of Muir and Thoreau’s Transcendentalism and the morality of the Christianized sublime. Focusing rather on the fallibility of humankind and its penchant for sin, these writers cast an often painfully honest light on the contradictions and incongruences of American society during the rise of industry. Poe, it seems, would have loved Abbath– the utilitarian aspect of popular Romantic literature of the time was a perspective that Poe felt was an offence to the craft. He called it “heresy of the Didactic.”^[12] Poe felt that writing’s primary concern should be to create an atmosphere where readers could “experience the ‘probable but impossible’”^[13] He also believed that when works had an obvious meaning, they ceased to be art.^[14] One method Poe used to expose the darkness of that period was the use of the supernatural. Ghosts, haunted houses, and talking birds were physical embodiments of the darkness of humanity– very metal for their time. In his wildly popular narrative poem The Raven, a spectral visitor in the form of a black raven becomes a manifestation of self-judgement for the admissions of a mourning narrator, only repeating the word ‘nevermore’ in condemnation of the man’s guilty past.^[15] Supernatural beings and events in Poe’s work act as stand-ins for humanity’s exit from Eden. They allow all characteristics of humanity, good and bad, to exist in plain sight, and not remain swept under the rug of apparent morality. It’s fitting that there are so many metal songs and bands that use Poe and his raven as both inspiration and characters in their music.^[16]

What seems to be lacking in the history of landscape art is that morally unburdened aesthetic experience. Dark Romanticism tapped into that ethical ambiguity by portraying the natural world in non-human terms. Instead of the grace of a loving God in the rocks and hills, Poe’s Descent into the Maelström,^[17] and Melville’s Moby Dick^[18] both abandon capable men in an unknowable and impossible wild. Poe’s Jonas Ramus, and Melville’s Captain Ahab face the reality of the forces of nature head on, and pay the price. For these men, the only lessons to learn were that first, the systems at work in the natural world don’t hold a special place in their heart for humanity, and second, suggesting that the whole of nature has ‘a heart’ in the first place only reinforces a narrow, and more importantly incomplete human-centric perspective.

In the wake of Poe and Melville, more stories like Jack London’s 1903 novel Call of the Wild cleared a path for the adventure fiction writing genre. It was clear that stories offering something beyond the human experience were gaining popularity, and as readers yearned for stories that went beyond the earthly realm, it’s no surprise that high fantasy and science fiction came along after. Blending regional folklore with the influence of industry, fantasy fiction hit the escapism wave of the post-war West like a face-melting guitar solo. Mix traditional fables with a bit of mythology and speculative thinking, and KA-POW! J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis became the shapers of destiny for generations to come. They tapped into the stories of their homelands, added what they knew of the modern world, and you know where it went from there. Now we have renaissance fairs, D&D, video games, Action Comics, LARP, Magic the Gathering, Game of Thrones, and of course, metal. These are a few of the successors of Dark Romanticism, love them or hate them. What they all have in common though is that things aren’t all sunshine and rainbows. Shit happens, people die, worlds burn, and evil occasionally triumphs. 

The archetypal figures and allegories found in folklore, mythology, and fantasy writing are a major influence on metal. We have always loved fantasy protagonists, and wizards especially. Nothing like a Gandalfian hermit character to get our righteous mystical wanderer juices flowing. Imagine having the magical abilities and knowledge of a seasoned mage, travelling the wilderness, solving riddles, befriending animals, battling the forces of evil, and generally just going it alone in the wide wide world. You know secrets nobody else does, you have ancient knowledge, you wield powers beyond human capability. This is the dream of every kid who grew up on folklore, playing in the woods, reading The Hobbit, and watching cartoons. It’s also the lyrical inspiration for a litany of black metal songs, and you probably knew I was gonna say that. The real world is not enough. We want magic, and it’s out there in the deep, dark forest.

Dark Ecology and the Sinister Wild

John Muir’s adventures through the American West heavily reflect the pleasurable moments of discovery wilderness, but rarely give one the whole story. The bear he encountered atop Indian Canyon received brief mention, but was never contextualised into America’s grand vision of nature. The bear is a metaphor for a larger experience beyond the human, which sadly doesn’t concern most nature lovers. This misaligned outcome is another aspect of darkness tied to Dark Romanticism that I feel is missing in the idealism of both Muir’s writings and the sublime painting movement. In order to offer an experience of the wild that is whollysublime, we must reach further back and further forward in ecological time beyond human history. For this, you can look to the philosophical movement of Dark Ecology, bringing us ever closer to the tenants of Cascadian black metal, and both of which focus on principles of nature on its own terms.

The Dark Ecology movement evolved from Deep Ecology, an ecological philosophy or ecosophy developed in the 1970’s by Arne Næss and George Sessions. Dark Ecology, like its Deep predecessor, sees human life as just one of many parts of a global ecosystem, and asserts the idea that nonhuman life on Earth has value independent of nature as a human resource.^[19] Many Cascadian black metal musicians ascribe to these ideals, attempting to extract the histories of human existence from their spiritual aspirations in order to focus on a timeless natural ecology. Doing this reveals hidden ecological systems at work over an inexhaustible time frame, and provides an opportunity to reimagine our human relationship to the landscape around us. The term dark in Dark Ecology initially sounds like an oxymoron. “Ecology is usually not seen as dark and certainly not as sinister – but it is.” affirms Dark Ecologist Arie Altena. “To think ecologically… means taking the idea of the entanglement of everything with everything, of the living with the non-living, seriously… Consequently, the human viewpoint is not taken as primary.”^[20] Dark Ecology encourages humans to rethink their perspectives about the natural world, to face the reality of our current ecological situation, and to see themselves moving ahead in new ways. Those new ways are often characterised as inconvenient, messy, and sometimes brutal, much like the characteristics of black metal. When putting myself in the mindset of a melancholy Cascadian black metal artist or fan, wanting to dissolve into the mists of the coastal rainforests of the Pacific Northwest coast, integrating oneself into deep time and living according to a much longer and less structured life cycle than humans sounds pretty appealing. As the land is further changed by industry, commercial resourcing, and the resulting climate shifts, the existential difference between what we’ve created for humanity and what would have naturally continued ecologically becomes more and more clear, and it makes us feel pretty awful. Awful enough for some to turn that feeling into the most intolerable, brash, and tortured music people can imagine.

Cascadian Black Metal and the Melancholy Path

At last, let’s set the scene for Cascadian black metal:

Night falls across the mountains and the world sinks into silence. Jagged, slate-strewn peaks cradle a patchwork of windswept glaciers shrouded in snow above the timberline. In the forest below, ancient conifers arch and bend across the hillsides in an endless, labyrinthine woodland cathedral. Further below, a hooded wanderer treads slowly up a winding path between boulders blanketed in wet moss. From under their deerskin cloak, gloved hands wreathed in gemstones grip a tall staff, its handle adorned with a spear point of smoky quartz and a raptor’s guide feathers. As twilight descends, the wanderer reaches a small clearing and turns. Raising a hand to the sky, they capture the last blue light of dusk in a glittering crystal sphere held in their palm. 

The drums kick in, and as the beat continues, the drone of a tribal horn passes over an echoey guitar riff. The tension builds with the clatter of cymbals, and then all at once the tempo quadruples, the bass drum double-times with the snare, guitars alight and rip through the silence in a wall of scorching sound. The night ritual begins.

I’ve just described the first 45 seconds of the music video for the song Mountain Magick^[21] by Wolves in the Throne Room, a Cascadian black metal band from Olympia, Washington. Ritual objects, symbols, and practices within the landscape of the Pacific Northwest are pretty much the whole bag for Wolves in the Throne Room, and they do it well. Want music that sonically and lyrically reconnects to you the spirit of a forest of giant sequoias, cedar, and fir? With springs gurgling from the mouths of glittering crystal caves? While burning sage and mugwort to enter a dream realm? You’ll get it from Wolves in the Throne Room, and you won’t be disappointed. Look to any of their song lyrics for a poetic call to commune with the natural world:

“I will lay down my bones among the rocks and roots of the deepest hollow next to the streambed / The quiet hum of the earth's dreaming is my new song / When I awake, the world will be born anew.”^[22]

If you’ve been paying attention, then it’s obvious that black metal has roots in Dark Romanticism. Like its literary predecessor, it shares a similar analysis of the sublime and the natural world. Most metal subgenres draw from the depths of the Dark Romantic experience, summoning casts of characters, creatures, and spirits to expose and explore the dark side of humanity. Metal musicians create environments of sound and lyrics that can sink to the deepest and most desolate place, and elevate to the most triumphant. Words that I associate with metal are: epic, sincere, layered, intricate, and powerful. These are themes that could easily be associated with classical music, and it’s no surprise that a majority of metal songs are crafted with the same song structure as classical music, using primary themes, expositions, refrains, choruses, and even choral sections if you get into metal’s symphonic subgenres. Swap out classical strings, wind, and percussion instruments for electric guitars, bass guitars, keyboards, and a drum kit, and voilà, you’ve got metal. The intellectual benefits of this complex form of music can be appreciated the same, as each instrument requires virtuosic skill to accompany the breakneck tempos and sweeping arcs of each song, and not to mention the superhuman vocal acrobatics of its singers. Dark and visceral emotions are stirred by metal, but with an ironic, and you might say slightly-humorous self-awareness that comes with being overly fantastical. It’s undeniably earnest, though, no matter how you look at it. Cascadian black metal perceives the dark side of humanity a little differently, however, prompting us to understand the darkness not only as maliciously or demonically evil human traits, but as the deeply spiritual side of ourselves still in harmony with the natural world. This reframing can still be fierce and brutal, but not just generic wickedness. “Delve far enough into Metal, and you’ll find environmentalists,” claims writer Erik Davis.^[23] One of the clearest examples of this notion are the founders of Wolves in the Throne Room. For Aaron and Nathan Weaver– two brothers with backgrounds in eco-activism, “Black metal just makes sense; its melodramatic Satanism transformed into an angry lament for human folly. But [Wolves in the Throne Room] doesn't just mourn. It also aims its epic melodies toward the old Romantic sublime, drawing the listener into the dream of a vital and resurgent earth.”^[24] Mediaeval historian Brenda S. Gardenour Walter points out the lyrics of the Weaver brothers from Wolves in the Throne Room are often a spirited call back to a regional primitivism, a “demand [to] return to a pre-modern wilderness in which humans purportedly lived at one with the climax forests of the Pacific Northwest.”^[25] Walter goes on to assert that even the psychological framework of black metal lends itself to the sublimity of nature, imagining its ethos as “an autumnal forest that grows ever colder and thicker as one journeys inward to its abyssal core.”^[26] Black metal songs are evocative of tragedy, solace, introspection, perseverance, and resilience, frequently narrated from the viewpoint of someone who knew better– someone who knows the power and consequence of acknowledging what threatens their own existence, like Muir’s bear. The lyrics are endlessly torn between empathy and apathy, something very closely related to the writing styles of not only Dark Romantics, but of Dark Ecologists as well. Exemplified further by Dark Ecology, a common focus of Cascadian black metal is to highlight the social, cultural, and ecological failures of humankind in spiteful prophecy, and then anguish in the consequences. Vancouver-based Cascadian black metal band Scalding makes that point directly in their song The Great Unknown: “I'm alone / Weight I've created insubstantial / Trivial / I'm adrift / I care not for needs of man / Whose ends are known” and follows up with a popular esoteric phrase recognizing the union between our earthly bodies and the spiritual afterlife, ”As above, so below / From the stars, to my throne”^[27] “Our lyrics often take a bleak or nihilistic view of humanity, sometimes from the perspective of the force of evil.” says Scalding frontman Simon M. “This isn’t to suggest I support this personally, but rather it’s what I feel best matches the tone of the music.”^[28] When I asked Simon if there were any writers or philosophers that influenced the band’s music, he referenced their song Asunder from the same album, which features a sample of American astronomer and planetary scientist Carl Sagan: 

The earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and in triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.^[29]

Simon said they wanted to include Sagan’s famous quote because  “...he combines science, history, and philosophy to put everything in perspective. And that perspective is that humans are insignificant, and there will always be knowledge and powers which are out of our control. And yet we will often dedicate our lives to try to attain what is unattainable, however futile.” The messages in black metal are disturbing, and they’re designed as such. Erik Davis candidly backs this up: “I mean, aren't you a bit disturbed? Lots of people who open their souls to today's seemingly relentless assault on wild creatures and wild places find themselves gripped by bitterness, melancholy, and misanthropy.”^[30]

It’s easy to see Cascadia as a magical place, and magical places always stir the imagination. It only takes a little more encouragement from classic folklore and mythology to get you catching strange things out of the corner of your eye in the forest– fairies, gnomes, nine-tailed foxes, nymphs, will-o-the-wisp, Ents, skinwalkers, Sasquatch, Ogopogo, Mothman. This section of the west coast is a doomed and paranormal paradise, and we adore it because of that. There is a mysterious and fleeting feeling about this place, something melancholy, like we’re sitting on the beach under a bluebird sky and already missing it. In the music and lyrics of Cascadian black metal, contradicting existential perspectives exist: the world around us is dark and fantastical, and we are powerful, demonic and heroic agents or retribution within it, attuned to the will of the devastated world around us and fighting back in its name. We are also lonely, exiled, and grief-stricken specks of dust in an infinite cosmos that cares not for our troubles, and may erase us at any time. While these sentiments are clearly in opposition to each other in terms of our individual sense of purpose and agency, there was never a rule about black metal being one thing, and Cascadian black metal seems to have bridged that gap, accepting that we live in a world where both are possible, and inextricably linked. The question– am I a powerful force within this broken world of my own creation, or is my existence insignificant in a vast, consciousless universe? is not unlike theosophy’s ultimate quandary. To me, this is the aesthetic heart of Cascadian black metal: Does your life on this planet mean something? Yes, and no. More answers are out there, in the murky forests, but also more mysteries. Better get out there and explore, maybe shred a couple of spine-tingling riffs along the way.
 

Black Metal’s Cultural Precarity

It’s not a secret that black metal’s Norwegian genesis was at the hands of some pretty shitty people. Racists, Homophobes, Sexists, Nationalists– a level of hypocritical bigotry only troglodytic White men can deliver. A lot of writing on extreme music addresses this history, and for good cause if we are to recover the soul of black metal as a ferocious and necessary resistance movement against rigid austerity. Black metal has always called upon fantastical and wicked forces to fight for liberation, whether that be for the world, the people, or the individual. Sadly, that righteous indignation in the hands of so many of its early musicians led to an elitism that viciously excluded those who would have been cultural kin, and powerful allies too. In the years following black metal’s expansion from Scandinavia, the artistry and fandom has continued in a predominantly White, European, male echo chamber, with minimal diversity. And while there’s an ever growing presence of BIPOC^[31] singers, musicians, and fans across all metal genres, White supremacy and its insidious grip has been hard to kill, and the media surrounding the music has not been quick to course correct. In Laina Dawes’s book What Are You Doing Here? A Black Woman’s Life and Liberation in Heavy Metal, the radical ideas behind the music were there all along, but the diversity of metal’s in-crowd was slow to grow. “While there is a shared sense of metal repaying some of the world’s fairness in relation to social and economic class differences, the bottom line is that young white men remain the majority of the metal scene, thus their experience commonly defines the entire heavy metal experience.”^[32] With her focus on the experience of racial identity in the metal scene, particularly for Black women, Dawes makes a strong point about the contradictory nature of metal musicians and fans: “If you don’t like being judged, then why impose that attitude on the same people who might end up being those you could potentially hang out with?”^[33] It’s clear that the metal world suffers from personal racial and sexual biases, and like so many political and cultural movements, has historically kept like-minded people at odds, diminishing, perhaps by design, the power and threat of class solidarity.

The aesthetics of black metal have always kept a strange balance between the beautiful and terrible, but it seems many of the scene’s bigoted offenders use the ‘evil’ of the music as both a mask and shield for their racism and misogyny. Activist and anarchist author Margaret Killjoy points out how in a sad way, it's easy to see why fascists and freedom fighters are both attracted to rebellious themes across all media and discourse. “...I understand why we’re all drawn to drink from the same dark pool. A musical subculture is also an aesthetic culture. We make music–and visual art and fashion–to aesthetically express certain ideas. There are plenty of ideas to choose from in black metal.”^[34] The look and feel of the subculture, with its corpse paint, studded leather clothing, and ultraviolence fantasies, casts a wide net to anyone wanting to feel empowered, armed, and dangerous in their convictions. According to Killjoy, black metal can be interpreted in different ways as well, based on the themes their subgenre factions bring to bear: “The wild, chaotic dark beauty of nature. The wars we fight against society. Isolation and grief and loss. The acceptance of, and revelling in, our mortality. The old gods, or Satan, or whatever spirits we draw power from. …Anarchists have reasons to romanticise these ideas. So do fascists.”^[35]

If I had to add further explanations to the presence of nationalists, racists, and sexists in black metal in North America, I would argue that at a cultural level, European settlers, depending on their access to North American cultural history and racial and social diversity in their communities, have no healthy way of processing their generational guilt. The atrocities woven through every aspect of the European colonisation of this continent and the founding of their nations are too numbered and horrific for most to grapple with, and so feeling powerless, absolution through transcendent self-removal seems to be the only way to make it “okay” to have lived and breathed the air here, while having done nothing to right the past, except in the final moment of life when there is no further discomfort or labour possible. That so-called martyrdom as a remedy for an evil that cannot be undone could easily be misconstrued through black metal music. We want to die (absolve ourselves) from the horror in order to erase it, but instead we let it turn us into more of the horror on the way out, which ultimately changes nothing. 

Much like the landscapes and artwork of their homelands, European settlers in the North American West have become so generationally and culturally disconnected from their native homeland’s traditions, customs, and identity, they are desperate to latch onto any other cultural practices that are still thriving and evolving in their midst. In America, it’s easy to see this happening in every popular fashion trend and music genre over the last century, primarily from African-American and Hispanic cultures. In the more remote regions of the Pacific Northwest, where there is less African-American and Hispanic representation, the limelight shines brighter on the Aboriginal cultures of the region, which are vast and varied in their traditions and presence. Ironically, yet unsurprisingly, then, the cultural practices of the few remaining Indigenous nations–which America and Canada have tried to eradicate for centuries–somehow now resonate with White settlers, either through a felt shame or genuine curiosity, and also, I would argue, as echoes from our own Indigenous European pasts. We yearn to feel included in and reconnected to a rich and unique culture, and thus try our best to incorporate what we see around us–from which we are often uninvited–in shallow and appropriative ways. It’s painfully ironic that the culture we once saw as primitive and savage and in need of cleansing is now the only thread we may have left to the ways our pale ancestors similarly once lived. Something Cascadian black metal I believe is trying to do is reconnect in respectful ways to the land, inspired in some ways by Indigenous cultures, but not taking the easy road of appropriation. I perceive that’s the case, at least. If we’ve learned anything from the cultural phenomena of American mega-festivals like Burning Man, it’s that shallow, privileged White people wearing native headdresses in the desert dancing to electronic music while on psychedelic drugs is not the way to respect and reconnect with Indigenous knowledges and practices.

The Wolves in the Throne Room music video I previously described could easily serve as one of many how-to guides for anyone wanting to rethink their cultural and historic relationships to the land through a music genre. That’s not to say we should all make our own hermit costumes and cosplay Lord of the Rings out in the foothills of the Olympic Mountains. It’s also not to say that we should be burning sage and sweetgrass and praying to the native ancestors we never had. The Mountain Magick video, as a visual interpretation of the ideology of one of the most prominent Cascadian black metal bands out there, does the work of showing viewers a way to commune with the natural world in a spiritual and cultural structure of your own making. We are all capable of creating respectful and meaningful rituals that involve the tangible, ecological relationships we are still part of, whether we realise it or not. It may feel goofy or insincere to the uninitiated or self-conscious spectator, but the sincerity is there for the band members and fans. Nature-based traditions are shared between Indigenous cultures from all over the world, including northern European cultures. Remember, it was not so long ago that even the people of what is now England–the epicentre of colonial imperialism–were an Indigenous people with unique cultural and spiritual practices of their own. Recovering the original methods and meanings of long-lost or diluted pre-Norman traditions may be impossible in the modern world, especially in North America, but there is still a path ahead that can be walked, decorated, and ritualised in new ways, while honouring the echoes of the past– something metal cultures have always done. In Cascadia, we do this among the old-growth forests, under moonlight, wrapped in wolf hides and antlers, with ceremonial daggers and goblets, and offerings of cedar and salmon. 

Conclusion

If there was a fundamental idea behind Cascadian black metal, it is that the terms by which we experience the natural world, and how we see ourselves in relation to it, need to change. The entire aesthetic of the subgenre is in service to this. Following in its Scandinavian predecessor’s black metal’s origins as a resistance movement against a dogmatically religious government, Cascadian black metal forecasts an impending doom, and insists that something needs to be said about our future. It’s hell-bent on reminding us that the natural world needs to be understood in regard to Muir’s encounter with the bear– an antidote for those who still see the wilderness as a Garden of Eden, and those still under the spell of Romanticism– perspectives we might also ascribe to pop music, when compared to the culture of metal. The lyrics remind us time and time again about the power and potential of nature, and about speaking new truths. Cascadian black metal makes room for the shadows, adjust our eyes to the darkness of the past, and contemplates an unclear and unsettling future, all the while giving us permission to clothe ourselves in wizard cloaks, point crystals at the moon, pray to the old gods, rage in the loamy understory, and seek connection in the mycelium under our feet.

I find that the reasons I appreciate the wilderness of the Pacific Northwest are the same reasons I love Cascadian black metal. There is an aesthetic to this place called Cascadia, and when I immerse myself in the land here, the sounds of black metal come with it. I’ve learned through the music to question what reasons I really have for seeking out wilderness, and what I intend to find while I’m there. I go seeking the picturesque, but no longer accept that I am only going for the ideal majesty of mountain peaks and rushing rivers. I go to experience the sublime, but not for religious communion. I go to find mystery in the rocks and dirt and trees. I go to be humbled, to feel insignificant; to feel the speck of dust that is me in the infinite galaxy, and with that deep desire to disappear into the nothingness of darkness and despair, feel more appreciation for the life I have. Instead of demystifying that unknown through conquest and discovery, or saccharine, toxic positivity, I’d rather revel in the unknowable, peer hopelessly into the void, and feel it staring back. We can’t help but marvel, like Muir, at the mirrored tranquillity of a mountain lake, or look across a valley of wildflowers and see the wondrous, perfect gift that is nature. And it is wondrous. And worth painting, I might add– metal bands still need epic album cover art! But what I believe Cascadian black metal also offers is a reminder of the bear in the bushes nearby. It seems fitting that the atmosphere it creates may bring to mind grand vistas and wanderings through deep woods, but also reveal something more: something like beauty, something of the sublime, something wildly unknown. More importantly, something immensely dark, that helps strengthen what is still light, and illuminate what hope remains for ourselves, for each other, and for all life in this world. Want a little more? Take this Tolkien quote as my final offer, which could have single-handedly inspired the Cascadian black metal genre: “The world is indeed full of peril, and in it there are many dark places; but still there is much that is fair, and though in all lands love is now mingled with grief, it grows perhaps the greater.”^[36]

Cue the drums, please. 

References

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Cascadia Bioregion: About Cascadia. (online: accessed 23.05.2024 under: https://cascadiabioregion.org/the-cascadia-movement).

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Dawes, Laina 2012: What Are You Doing Here? A Black Woman’s Life and Liberation in Heavy Metal. New York: Bazillion Points.

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Irving, Washington 1967: A Tour on the Prairies. New York: Pantheon, 188.

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M., Simon 2024: ‘Questions for an Essay on Cascadian Metal.’ Amory Abbott (Ed.). April 27, 2024. Email Interview.

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^[1] Decolonial Atlas.

^[2] Cascadia Bioregion.

^[3] Vankin 2023.

^[4] Muir 1911, 116.

^[5] Schulz 2015.

^[6] Thomas Moran.

^[7] Lewis 2002, 27.

^[8] Ebd.

^[9] Thoreau championed the need for civilization to “get back to nature,” and would then go on to help conceive transcendentalism, a widely borrowed philosophy that served in part as a foundation of modern environmentalism. 

^[10] Irving 1967, 188.

^[11] Muir 1911, 121.

^[12] Kasinec/Onorato 1997.

^[13] Ebd.

^[14] Ebd.

^[15] Poe 2004, 1-5.

^[16] Rotting Christ’s song The Raven is a full-on metal rendition of the poem.

^[17] Poe, 1841.

^[18] Melville 2003.

^[19] Naess 1995, 3.

^[20] Altena.

^[21] Wolves in the Throne Room 2022. 

^[22] Wolves in the Throne Room 2007.

^[23] Davis 2007.

^[24] Ebd.

^[25] Gardenour Walter 2015, 123.

^[26] Ebd., 115.

^[27] Scalding 2022.

^[28] M. 2024.

^[29] Sagan 1993.

^[30] Davis 2007.

^[31] Black, Indigenous, People of Color.

^[32] Dawes 2012, 22.

^[33]  Ebd., 105.

^[34] Killjoy 2023.

^[35] Ebd.

^[36] Tolkien 1954, 367.