16 - On Horseback They Carried Thunder

Summary

Since its first moments of relatively wide visibility in the 1990s, black metal music has been one of the most controversial and artistically fecund subgenres of metal. In particular, a rash of serious crimes perpetrated by Norwegian black metallers boosted its visibility, and the salacious details of this period were well-covered by journalists, cultural critics and academics. Following this period, however, black metal musicians around the world took a wide range of approaches to the genre. However, one persistent aspect of black metal’s musical practice is the foregrounding of geographic location and local cultures within both the music and visual artwork. This chapter explores on black metal in the United States’s Mountain West, where the musical and ideological tropes of Norwegian black metal are recontextualised into forms that honour this new location while still retaining key points of Norwegian black metal’s worldview. The focus is particularly on the Colorado band Wayfarer’s interrogations of settler colonialism and the cowboy mythos of Hollywood westerns, but the chapter also touches on broader currents of environmentalism and indigenous activism in North American black metal.