“A Spirit-Swarm on Silty Eddies”:
Black Metal by the North Sea
(Fortress Festival, Scarborough, 2025)
I stand upon the cliff
My hands upon the gate
Watching the waves below
Cause stone to resonate
With these lines, at the start of the song “Tides of Glass”, the East-Anglian band Fen begin a black-metal evocation of bleak North Sea coasts. The gentle resonance, as the song and sea escalate, annihilates the cliffs and everything humans had built on them. The EP this song is from, Stone & Sea (2015), was inspired by the last gravestone at the village of Dunwich, where a monastery, port, and graveyard lie beneath the waves. The cemetery’s former occupants are now, as Fen put it, “a spirit-swarm on silty eddies”. Only the headstone of Jacob Foster (died 1796, aged 38) still teeters on the edge, like an analogy for our whole society in an age of rising seas.
In these times of crisis, black metal is beginning to feel like one of the most urgent and vital art forms we have. Watery, oceanic metal is having a particular moment, and so too is a parallel literary phenomenon: a kind of shoreline apocalypticism summed up in the opening to James Rebanks’ most recent book, The Place of Tides (2024):
The age of humans will pass. Perhaps the end has already begun, though it may take a long time to play out. If this were a Hollywood movie, the final scenes would be a man running around with a gun in some ruined cityscape, but I don’t think the last people will hang around in cities: there’s no food in urban areas when order breaks down. People will flee to the extremities. They will run from the chaos, disease, and killing machines to the places where a life can still be scraped from our ruined ecosystems. The last humans will, like many of the first, hold to the coast, scratching a living from the sea and the shore. I met someone like that once, a woman right at the outermost edge. A woman still living after everything she knew and understood had ended.
In the midst of all this, could there be a better time to make a pilgrimage along the North Sea coast for the UK’s leading festival of music’s most provocatively nihilistic genre?
Next year, I intend to make the pilgrimage by boat, but decided this year to arrive on foot. This meant passing along the edges of North Yorkshire’s vast seabird cliffs. The imminence of Fortress was evident even there, in the black-clad couple - wearing Dissection and Darkthrone shirts - pointing binoculars out over flocks of jet-black razorbills and guillemots. The gleaming white gannets the cliffs are most famous for are just as gothic as the darker birds: while I quickly photographed them, I couldn’t help thinking of all the coastal tales of gannets as instruments of death and the ocean’s justice. Here, for example, is Robin Robertson, poet of the coastal gothic, in a grim little poem called “The Law of the Island”:
They lashed him to old timbers
that would barely float,
with weights at the feet so
only his face was out of the water.
Over his mouth and eyes
they tied two live mackerel
with twine, and pushed him
out from the rocks.
They stood then,
smoking cigerettes
and watching the sky,
waiting for a gannet
to read that flex of silver
from a hundred feet up,
close its wings
and plummet-dive.
By the time I got to Scarborough, the beach was already full of long-haired people in black denim vests stitched with band patches. Dressed in my own battle jacket, I could barely pause without friendly black-metal strangers, from Austria or Oregon, stopping to talk music and discuss our journeys here.
Fortress happens each May in Scarborough’s Victorian spa, making full use of its illustrious theatres and famous sun court. Metres from churning sea and in the shadow of the clifftop castle, the place is atmospheric even before a note has been played. Popping outside for food in the evening, the twin roars of the sea and black metal intertwine – waves becoming like the tape hiss on the lo-fi demos that helped imbue the early scene with an atmosphere like storm winds through pine trees.
For those who don’t know me, I write about the coastal environment, its communities, species, and histories. But I’ve also been playing and listening to metal for twenty-five years. It’s only recently that those two worlds, which most people might think entirely different, have collided. That’s what drew me to Fortress Festival: researching for some projects about metal, the ocean, the natural world, and environmentalism (you can read the first attempt to write an academic-style article on the theme, explaining the project’s origins and purpose, here).
This year’s headliners were part of the draw. Agalloch, playing in the UK for the first time since 2015, were instrumental in creating a US style of nature and landscape inspired black metal, rich with influences from North American traditions for conceptualising the natural world. Their stage show at Fortress evoked the Northern lights and the misty landscapes of their local landscapes, Mount Hood and the Columbia Gorge, and they gave a talk in the Victorian theatre in which they discussed the music, arts, and nature that shape their albums. Film played a bigger role than I’d known: they described their love for poetic tracking shots, and summed up Agalloch songs as “very slow black & white tracking shots” of the Oregon landscape.
Agalloch’s presence sums up a lot about Fortress. The organiser, Gary Stephenson, devotes extraordinary efforts to securing a lineup completely different from every other event: bands, for instance, who rarely perform live or who’ve never played the UK. This meant that my absolute favourite kind of metal (which few bands, globally, play) was on display in unusual quantities. This is music that’s dissonant, complex, fierce, and atmospheric, all at the same time - the kind of music that builds immense beauty from the ugliest materials and in which there’s rarely a verse or chorus to be heard. One of the bands who do this best are New Zealand’s Ulcerate:
Another is Venezuela/Chile’s Selbst, who were making their UK debut here. Theirs was a particularly spectacular set that truly felt like watching someone pour their damaged heart out on stage, with a whole crowd lost in the catharsis.
Each of Ulcerate and Selbst’s latest albums (along with Orgone’s Pleroma) were among my top 3 of 2024. To me, they’re masterpieces that rival anything from metal’s (or any other music’s) past.
There were plenty more unique moments. This included a deliciously evil set from RUÏM, led by Blasphemer (once the drummer in Mayhem, perhaps the most infamous and legendary black metal band of all):
The set culminated in a true one-off: Ravn, singer from 1349, joined RUÏM onstage to perform vintage 1990s Mayhem.
Across the two days, hosts of other black-clad figures emerged from the onstage mist:
Dödsrit and The Great Old Ones were particular highlights, with intensity onstage that felt like seeing early Slayer or Metallica (there was serious thrash frontman energy channeled through those white flying Vs).
But the main reason I was at Fortress was for interviews. I’d arranged to talk with three musicians who take very different approaches to the relationships between black metal and the natural world.
First was Frank Allain of Fen. I’ve been listening to Fen since their debut album in 2009, when I only lived about thirty miles from the landscapes that inform their music. Ever since, they’ve been singular in their fenland focus and I had lots of questions about Frank’s relationships with the landscape. So we talked about his formative years wandering the fens while getting into extreme metal and trying to start musical projects in rural Suffolk. Frank described the landscape - extremely bleak, with massive skies and cold winds - as full of moods that “seep into your unsconsciously”, especially when you’re going through difficult and formative teenage experiences. He talked of early albums aiming to be the auditory equivalent of walking through the fens in autumn at twilight: to begin with, the songs were, he said “very much metaphorical, about an inner landscape being reflected by an outer landscape”. Later albums took a viewpoint from the fens as a vantage for thinking not just of the subconcious but of humanity as a whole. Winter, for instance, is an album about death, but filtered through fenland atmospheres and concepts. The latest album, Monuments to Absence, explores the human remnants that will scar the landscape long after species extinction.
I wanted to talk, though, about Stone & Sea, the EP I quoted at the start of this post. Its references to places seemed unusually specific for a Fen release. Frank told me how and why the EP came to be, and talked me through its artwork depicting the eroded cliffs of East Anglia. He told me (I hadn’t known before) that it was Dunwich in Suffolk that inspired the music, after his brother, Fen’s bass player, had become fascinated by its stories. We talked about the fate of Dunwich, eaten by the sea centuries before rising sea levels begin to threaten us all. We talked, too, about Frank’s distinctively black-metal vision of the future. The reason, he said, that extra-terrestrial contact will surely never happen is the paradox that any species advanced enough for space travel will have already developed the capacity to destroy itself many times over. The natural world, in this vision, is a perspective-shifting counterweight to humanity’s fleeting misadventures.
Next was Selbst, whose bleak worldview made Fen look positively cheerful. Their guitarist, singer, and sole songwriter (who simply goes by the name “N”) grew up on the coast of Venezuela, before the country’s political and economic collapse which left huge numbers in extreme poverty and ended aspects of cultural life such as the nation’s metal scene. N left and settled in urban Santiago, where his music protests economic marginalisation in “these dehumanising times”. “I hate cities”, he told me, explaining that the outlook informing Selbst is shaped by “the overwhelming indifference of nature”, the fragility of humanity, and the ultimate reclaiming of all things by natural forces. We talked about how this is expressed in the twisting roots and gnarled trees of the band’s artwork which don’t evoke a rural past but prophesy the future. I was struck by the way N never talked about humanity in isolation. In a sentence where others might say “people”, N said “all creatures”, and made several references to, for example, human society being “more fragile than many other species”. This felt wholly fitting for black metal’s raw, animal, croaks, rasps, and catharsis.
By the time it came to my evening interview, I was ready for a little hope. Fortress is unusual among metal festivals in having an acoustic stage. There’s an apparent tension in modern black metal between its evocations of nature and its heavily distorted electric means of production. But black metal thrives on contradictions and uncertainties. As Aaron Weaver of Wolves in the Throne Room puts it, “One of the many contradictions of Black Metal is that it is a music that decries civilization, but relies on so many modern contrivances to exist…It is really the sound of paradox, ambiguity, confusion, being caught between two worlds that cannot be reconciled”. One musician who makes particularly adept use of the creative space within these paradoxes happened to be playing Fortress’s acoustic stage. I couldn’t photograph Sylvaine (Kathrine Shepard) here (the acoustic stage was a phone and camera free zone), but I was at the Norwegian ambassador’s residence earlier this year when she performed a few songs (wish I’d recorded a clip that included her amazing rasped black-metal vocals).
Sylvaine’s music, like many other current projects, exists at several points on a spectrum between black metal and neo-folk (the metal/folk record label, Eisenwald, is a great place to find more). There’s a long traditional of black metal using field recordings, folk songs, and traditional, often locally-specific instrumentation. While early in black metal’s history this often had nationalist connotation, it’s now put to a huge range of different, and more interesting, uses. Sylvaine’s releases range from acoustic settings of nineteenth-century poetry, recorded in a church, to full-blown black metal with acoustic interludes. We talked about the many dualities involved in the music. These include the rural, natural world and urban spaces. Katherine explained that she took the name Sylvaine to blend sylvan, chosen to represent the rural, with echoes of the name of a more urbane inspiration, the poet Paul Verlaine. But even Verlaine’s most urban poems are often entirely elemental, as in perhaps his most famous lines of all which entangle tears and city rain, emotions and weather (“Il pleure dans mon coeur / comme il pleut sur la ville. / Quelle est cette langueur / qui pénètre mon coeur?")
And Oslo, where Sylvaine grew up, is a city that expresses these dualities: surrounded by forest that plays a vibrant role in city people’s lives (the language Sylvaine used to describe the forest made it sound almost like a human neighbour). She described the way that nature is her only real collaborator in this project, since her practice involves recording musical ideas then listening to them on headphones while walking in the forest. This generates the clarity to transform demos into polished songs.
Sylvaine’s dualities also include deep, existential, darkness – “the struggle of human society, and how it feels to watch it fall apart” – and the small lights of hope that guide a route beyond. This hope is often figured in terms of natural, particularly forest, imagery. But one thing I love about Sylvaine’s musical handling of these things is that they’re never predictable: black metal elements spell light as often as darkness, and folk speaks despair as frequently as hope. That unpredictability adds enormous emotional weight, since the music can always catch the listener off guard.
We talked more about Sylvaine’s outlook and its spirituality, including the roles the natural world plays as a foil to human ambition, a source of connection, and a reminder of the beings we are when stripped of artifice and ego.
These were among my first interviews for this project. Hopefully among the first of many, including fans as well as musicians. Such exciting things are happening in metal right now, that I want to understand the relationship between the music and the times we’re living through. And black metal’s changing visions of the natural world feel like an excellent place to start. The diversity of music and vision present at Fortress permitted a bewilderingly fast running start. It has been a long time, I think, since black metal has sounded so vital.