This book is a detailed ethnographic study of black metal that argues for anti-essentialist research on the extreme ideological associations of this underground music culture, that takes seriously the importance of precisely describing and analysing ambiguity in understanding the politics of black metal, given that distortion and noise are present in all dimensions of its musical, aesthetic, and cultural production. Rather than focusing on particular bands or recordings, the research examines the wider black metal underground, drawing on a range of underused sources including print zines, online discussion, and music recordings, as well as fieldwork observation at live music events and the creation of a black metal zine. The book shows how black metal involves a range of discursive mechanisms that evade the stable ideological positions sought in many responses to black metal’s problematic political affiliations, and demonstrates how these structures generate perpetual ambiguous conflict and debate. Chapters examine these ‘controversy engines’ in relation to definitions, borders, illegibility, humour, the imagined past, and marginal religion, before examining the striking ambivalence that appears even in ostensibly explicit uses of extremist political symbolism.

Owen Coggins is Research Fellow in Music at the University of Huddersfield, UK, where he works on ‘The Amplification Project’.