It sucks because black metal has become one of my favourite subgenres in metal. I absolutely love how there is this reoccurring theme of worshipping nature in all her beauty and brutality. It is so sick.

I stayed away from black metal entirely in my teens back in the 2000s because of all the scary rumors, but began listening to some of it during the pandemic. I was in this music exploration phase and black metal totally blew my mind. It is genuinely one of the most beautiful subgenres in metal.

And yes, there are nazis and Satanists and so on in this subgenre, but black metal was also built by and for edgelords originally. The amount of snarky gatekeepers and contrarianism that went on at the birth of Norwegian black metal is so beyond cringe that when I finally sat down and read up on the history, I had several times where I felt secondhand embarrassment for everyone involved.

The types of people who are attracted to the original philosophy of black metal tend to also be very immature types who seek shocking and repulsive behaviors to have people around them react. The fact that they, among many other things, attach themselves to nazisism is just a symptom of the edgelord mindset where everything is done to one-up and shock others. It is so pathetic.

Meanwhile there are also many normal people who just want to make awesome art and black metal is a way for them to be killer fucking poets/musicians while looking and sounding like rotting corpses.

I have a few artists and bands I listen to and love for their songs about nature or mental health. Psychonaut4, Lustre, Blackbraid, Advent Sorrow, Nargaroth, Thy Light and Agalloch are some of my go-to artists when I'm in my BM corner.

I always bring this one up, because I cannot help it, but one of my favourite lyrics of all times is from Agalloch's In the Shadow of Our Pale Companion:

Here at the edge of this world

Here I gaze at a pantheon of oak, a citadel of stone

If this grand panorama before me is what you call God

Then God is not dead

🤌🤌🤌🤌🤌