The Devil Waits for All

A Bougie Metalhead's Journey Through Kvlt and Coffee

I can't remember the last "metal" album I bought before stumbling across Belzebubs' Pantheon of the Nightside Gods, but I'm pretty sure it was around 2017. Regardless, that CD turned out to be quite a fun Way Back Machine to a genre I'd drifted away from.

The album is the 2019 musical offshoot of a web comic by JP Ahonen, who has since conjured two volumes of hardback anthologies—a delightfully crude and blasphemous slice-of-life (cut with a ritual athame, naturally) comedy about a black metal family. Complete with pentacle summoning circles and literal monsters under the bed, it riffs on the genre's tropes harder than a trio of head-banging guitar shredders. It's a funny, cute, and surprisingly gentle look at everyday life. There's even "Blasphe My"-inspired, doubtlessly by Tove Jansson.

As far as I know, the Belzebubs "band" is one of those Gorillaz-esque studio endeavors without any "real world" musicians credited. There's an untold joke about Finland having the highest number of metal bands per capita in the world, so they probably could have grabbed any corpse-painted musician hanging around the neighborhood K-Market.

Pantheon is impeccably executed, hitting all the requisite points of the black metal genre: the blast beats, abyssal vocals, grinding bass, riffed and shredded guitars, plus the bits of choir, symphony, and moody synths. Originality isn't the goal here—feature, not a bug—this is the sort of adept and polished, strings-and-choirs-augmented fare that folks like Dimmu Borgir fashioned. I'm sure that's either a turn-on or a turn-off depending on the shade of black flags your kvlt flies.

Maybe it's the time I spent away from the genre, but the summoning circle was glowing, and the emanating sounds—homage, parody, polish, and pastiche—were glorious. And yeah, I'm six (six six) years too late to this party, but then the Devil waits for all men, welcoming them with fire and hot dogs.

From Provocation to... Product Placement?

Returning to the abyss had me thinking a bit about this genre whose practitioners carve the line between sincerity and self-parody with a chainsaw. I was again a decade late to the "second wave" party that had literally burst into flames in Norway, with suicide, murder, and arson providing a WTF moment of détournement. Throw in some neo-Nazi, fascist idiocy along with Varg Vikernes spouting racist ideology in prison while his mom tried to sneak a file inside a cake, and the historic document Lords of Chaos reads like a folktale too fantastic to be real.

For all the supposed transgressiveness of black metal, the moment Dimmu's "Progenies of the Great Apocalypse" hit a Hellboy trailer in 2004, the recuperation began. The genre didn't collapse. The corpse paint didn't crack. The musicians just shrugged their studded leather shoulders and carried on—grim, determined, and unbothered.

This was also around the time Gorgoroth caused international scandal for staging a live TV performance in Kraków featuring naked models "crucified" on stage, sheep and pig heads impaled on stakes, and liturgical props drenched in blood. The Polish authorities were not amused, launching investigations for blasphemy and cruelty to animals. You could say 2004-2005 was the pivot point where black metal's split became undeniable: one band soundtracked a Hollywood franchise, the other got frisked by cops. Black metal didn't split—it just revealed both faces of the corpse-painted coin.

And then in 2018, the Mayhem/Euronymous/Varg saga was released as a feature film, Lords of Chaos. Add washing machine commercials featuring corpse-painted homebodies doing laundry, then the recuperation completes its cycle, with fangs de-venomed and Capitalist mission achieved.

Incidentally, that year we visited one of the stave churches that Varg torched—subsequently rebuilt, of course. The irony wasn't lost on me: the place was breathtaking, a pagan-rooted work of art, a living contradiction that black metal should have celebrated. Damn kids. Sigh.

Nordic Encounters

Speaking of the northern, frost-bitten lands, I visited Finland for the first time last fall. My spouse, for whom that was her third visit, signed up for a collage workshop at a bookstore in Helsinki. While she was cutting paper with other enthusiasts, I ended up talking with one of the owners—a fellow in a Dead Moon hoodie, which was enough of a signal to start the right kind of conversation.

He shared a couple of perfect war stories: Fred Cole swapping hearing aids between conversation and stage mode, and a NWOBHM singer (whose name escapes me) spitting out his dentures mid-set like it was part of the act. What might have been Spinal Tap outtakes became memorialized as folklore of icons as they aged. Only later did I find out the gentleman was literally the original vocalist for Finntroll—whose Humppa-fueled folk metal once powered my commutes with mischievous Nordic thunder.

I guess Finland's like that. You come for the quiet and the landscape, and leave having swapped stories with a legend you didn't recognize until your return flight took off from Vantaa.

Texas Crossroads

A while back, we drove from Houston to Austin to attend a gallery reception for Peter Beste's Norwegian Black Metal photobook—an austere, moody document of a scene that once set churches and imaginations on fire. The reception was hosted by college friends who also ran a micro-cinema that ran monthly outdoor screenings of The Big Lebowski. Of course it was.

Beste was there—quiet, observant, dressed like he could disappear into either a mosh pit or a darkroom. He'd later go on to photograph the Houston hip hop scene, trading corpsepaint for candy cars and grills. The shift wasn't as strange as it sounds: both cultures were self-mythologizing, raw, regional, and rooted in DIY ethos. Both made the underground loud.

Across time and distance, that coarse black thread of strangled guitars and tortured vocals sutures together the most unexpected quilt of people and things, and I’ve had the surprising opportunity of witnessing some of these connections as a privileged outsider.

The Bougie Metalhead's Confession

I've always been more sling bag and espresso shot than bullet belt and corpse paint. Bougie as hell indeed, and I look nothing like the bands I love. It's very much a dude thing, but a surprising number of my indiepop and even "twee" musician friends turned out to be closet metalheads. Maybe it's the shared obsessiveness over production values, or the way both scenes reward deep catalog knowledge and obscure band trivia. Or maybe when you spend your days crafting delicate, jangly guitar parts, sometimes you just need to hear someone blast-beat their way through a song about Norse mythology.

There's a beautiful absurdity in discovering that the same person who can spend an hour debating the merits of different guitar tones throughout The Clientele’s career also has strong opinions about the differences between Norwegian and Swedish black metal. The musical DNA isn't that different—both require a certain kind of devotion to atmosphere and an appreciation for how the smallest sonic details can conjure entire emotional worlds.

Nancy and I once subbed for the metal show at my alumni college radio station. She handled the read backs like a pro—calm, confident, not even flinching at the umlauts.

A week later we dropped by the neighborhood record shop, and one of the regulars perked up:

"Hey—who was that chick on the metal show last week?"
"Um, she's married."
"I don't care. Is she hot?"

Reader, she was. Still is. And she knows her way around both a collage workshop and a Borknagar deep cut.

The Devil's Patience

There's something poetic about it all—how the black metal that scorched churches could later be archived in coffee table tomes, or how a bookstore can hold a collage class and a metal veteran's war stories in the same afternoon. Some of us didn't burn churches—we just borrowed records, learned to count along with Messhuggah, and waited for the Devil to show up in used bookstores and radio station control rooms.

For all the glaring contradictions, the genre benefits from its bougie ambassadors, the ones who readily flit between the kvlt and the coffee shop, who appreciate both the mythology and the absurdity. We get the best stories this way—most metalheads don't accidentally stumble into conversations with Finntroll's original vocalist while their spouse is making art in a Helsinki bookstore.

The Devil waits for all men, sure—but sometimes he's behind the merch table, sipping a flat white, telling you how to get to the train station. Once bougie, always bougie. But also: once metal, always metal. The summoning circle keeps glowing, even when it's lit by the warm glow of a neighborhood bookshop.