It’s always been known that there is a certain resentment among death metal and black metal bands in metal environments. We can talk of pure hatred in the early ‘90s, but relationships have become shallower over the years; just think about the answer to the question made to some members of Norwegian black bands «Why was black metal born?» «…because everyone in Norway is sick of the shitty Swedish death scene». Actually, we have always been asked ourselves if this hatred is only about the nature of the two genres or the fact that Sweden and Norway are two neighbouring nations, too. It often happens that people of two neighbouring Countries don’t get along so well.
Sweden is so proud of its death metal to the point of getting advertising slogan out of it saying “Welcome in Sweden, the death metal motherland”, displayed at the airports and on buses… and Norway is just as proud of its black metal turning it into a topic of discussion at thesis after more than thirty years from its birth.
The fact is that beyond the pride and the several awards, there were unpleasant events that really happened and the main characters were the various people from one and the other side.

Death metal was born and evolved as musical genre, at first and around the mid ‘80s when it reached its peak, black metal, maybe, wasn’t even in an embryonic stage. According to expert opinion, black metal owes much to death metal, this may be debatable, but must be said that the first works of the major black metal bands have strong death metal influences; actually, Darkthrone, Immortal and Emperor were born playing death metal. Prior to founding Emperor, Ihsahn Vegard and Samoth were part of the Thou Shalt Suffer, a pure death metal band lasted two years only and prior to founding Immortal, both Abbath and Demonaz were active in the Amputation, pure death metal band, as well… not to mention Darkthrone then, who started as a death metal band with four demos in death style and even their debut album dated 1991, called “Soulside Journey” was defined as the album that any other death metal Swedish band would have wanted to record and that, at that time, nobody would think they were from Norway. Even the great Varg Vikernes who is the mastermind of the project Burzum and also the flag bearer of the black metal movement made in Norway, started his career as guitarist of the Old Funeral, a Norwegian death metal band…
We must say that the actual cause for which the true Norwegian black metal was born, arrived in 1988 from the meeting between Øystein Aarseth, the Norwegian guitarist called “Euronymous” and Per Yngve Ohlin, the Swedish singer called “Dead”, a real partnership between Norway and Sweden…
While the two boys were not in their twenties when they met at that time, Mayhem already produced two demos, “Pure Fucking Armageddon” dated 1986 and “Deathcrush” dated 1987, both of them rather crude and with a strong death metal influence. “Dead” came from a Swedish band called Morbid devoted to thrash and death metal. When he arrived in Norway to meet “Euronymous”, he told him to have left Morbid because he wanted to create something more devastating, something extreme, he felt they could go further and… the rest is history!

What went wrong? Considering the more or less positive premises, considering the strong influences between the matrix Swedish death metal and the Norwegian black metal, considering pure the partnership, even if not many. Why did the two scenes declare war? What have been the reasons for which they hated each other?
We are going to describe it in the next article… do not miss it, because what has happened is really unusual.