“I Felt the Landscape Screaming Through the Music”:

Metal, Nature, & Environmentalism

“A blastbeat to me is like water. Maybe others think of it as something really tough and hard. It feels like a waterfall to me, like crying really hard”.

Maria Stock, Ragana (Revolver Magazine, 2019)

“Blood, bile, intracellular fluid; a small ocean swallowed, a wild wetland in our gut, rivulets forsaken making their way from our insides to out, from watery womb to watery world: we are bodies of water”.

Astrida Neimanis, (Bodies of Water, 2017)

Metal music has often been associated with post-industrial landscapes and mechanized aggression. Leading studies use urban alienation and industrial excess to frame the origins and development of the genre (Weinstein: 1991; Bogue: 2004; Moore: 2009). Recent writing has, in parallel, explored how metal’s aesthetics promote individual self-realisation in ways that embody traditional humanist values of power over self, others, and the world (Gamble: 2021). Only the glacial atmospheres and ancient pine forests of black metal have consistently been interpreted as exceptions to this urban norm. Yet they too have been read as a product of humanist modernism, because of the misanthropic vision of an “aristocracy of the soul” that lay behind Norwegian black metal’s retreat from the city (Lukes & Panayatov: 2023). A tiny number of bands have been recognised as offering alternative engagements with nature and the environment. Gojira and Wolves in the Throne Room, in particular, have been presented as isolated exceptions whose environmental consciousness is an unlikely departure from metal’s core ideals and aesthetics (Seifert & Murray: 2012).

These interpretations neglect the work of thousands of musicians who use metal to pursue deep engagement with nature, wilderness, and environmentalism. A huge range of post-humanist and anti-humanist outlooks (of which black metal’s traditional misanthropy might be read as one) can be found in twenty-first century metal. Many bands’ ties to activist movements and embrace of anti-extractivist, off-grid, living, alongside the rapidly growing influence of indigenous metal, make this engagement far from casual or performative. This article explores how musicians articulate relationships with nature, rural space, and ecological crisis; it shows that many traditional narratives about the genre’s orgins, and assumptions about its aesthetics, tell only part of metal’s story.

One undercurrent of this study is the recurrence of water throughout modern metal. It takes the form of oceans, storms, and floods, as well as marshes, streams, springs, sweat, and tears. It acts as everything from aesthetic inspiration, to imagined conduit between states of being, symbol of individual catharsis, and medium of Gaian self-defence against the Promethean flame of industrial humanity. This makes the work of Astrida Neimanis, in texts such as Bodies of Water (2017) and “Weathering” (2014), a powerful tool for comprehending the ties between music and environment. Neimanis’s evocation of a “hydrocommons”, which can help us escape humanist modes of thought, and envision more socially and ecologically conscionable ways of being, has a surprising range of echoes in metal’s anti-humanistic perspectives. Their development has coincided with dramatic diversification in metal’s emotional associations. As the quote from Maria Stock, above, indicates, there’s space for vulnerability, anxiety, and grief, as well as power and rage, in metal’s expanded affective range. This amounts to new metal aesthetics crafted to process the emotional turmoil of the era of climate breakdown.

I

Heavy Seas

This study originates from field research around the North Atlantic. That research wasn’t initially about music: it explored relations with environment and place embodied in the building of traditional wooden and skin boats. But it profoundly shaped the form this study takes. In 2022-23, the project involved spells in numerous small coastal communities. These ranged from the West of Ireland and the Isle of Lewis, to Northern Sápmi, Faroe, West Greenland, and Newfoundland. Each settlement was a stop on journeys in small rowed or paddled boats, with routes calculated to study the interactions with seascapes they facilitated. Time ashore was spent assisting in the workshops where boats were built. This exposure to coastal life generated many surprises. One of the biggest was the music that blared from little stereos in the workshops. This was occasionally the folk that might, casually, be expected. But far more often it was contemporary metal. I was even introduced to Memoriam, a band from my own hometown (Birmingham, UK), in a qajaq workshop in Northwest Greenland.

Beyond the workshops, remarkable numbers of the people I talked to or travelled with – people who crossed my path because of their commitment to community, place, heritage, and environment – were metal musicians or otherwise invested in the music. Some seemed to consider the link between rugged rural coastlines, marginalized communities, environmental activism, and metal to be obvious and even natural. When they reeled off names of ecologically-committed and activist metallers - from Agruss to Unearthly Rites - I began to compile a list of bands and artists whose work engaged with environmentalist aesthetics and the anti-extractive grassroots politics of rural coastlines.

By the time I returned home, my list was close to three-hundred strong. Building a parallel bibliography, I found that black metal, death metal, metalcore, and grindcore have all been labelled “the music of the Anthropocene” (e.g. Morton: 2013; Netherton & Snaza: 2016). I found too that scholarship rarely conjured the atmosphere of crowds and live performance without nature, place, and environment as metaphor and stock of imagery. A leading recent study of the aesthetic means by which metal facilitates empowerment, for instance, opens with thunder, lightning, and the weather of an imagined wilderness flooding into the inner-city space of the mosh pit:

All around you – with you – allies seem to weather the storm, resilient raindrops in a squall of sonic power. Or maybe you face the gale alone at this moment, but you know you are part of something much bigger. This is your storm, after all. (Gamble: 2021).

Even when describing the contrasting stasis of some black metal crowds (“the still and silent types”), scholars describe “eye of the storm” experiences (Seifert & Murray: 2012). The language of weather and wilderness is as inescapable when reading of metal’s affect as it is in environmentalist theory. But I could find no analysis of the work these evocations perform.

I thought back to gigs I’d been at. I’d seen, for instance, the Irish band Primordial tour in support of their album The Gathering Wilderness (2006). Facing away from the crowd, as floor toms pummeled like pelting raindrops, their singer, Nemtheanga, opened the show with the lines “One day, I stood with my back to the wind/And the rain fell down”. The roar from the crowd swept, like incoming weather, across the pitch black space. By the time, fifteen minutes later, Nemtheanga sang “The Wilderness is gathering all its children in”, smoke machines had simulated a cloud-bound mountain peak. The music, like the stormy wet and wild imagery with which scholarship conjures metal’s crowds, seemed to assume that part of metal’s purpose is spatial dislocation: an imaginative translation from the city to somewhere weather-whipped and wild.

I found numerous interviews in which musicians conceptualized metal’s aesthetics as rural, environmental, and wet. These often figure nature as active, emotionally-charged, and a context for human futures rather than, as in early Norwegian black metal, a retreat from the present. The quote from Maria Stock at the start of this article illustrates the ways in which metal’s techniques have undergone substantive shifts in meaning: the machine-like barrage of the blastbeat now often described without reference to aggression or hostility but, instead, as organic and overwhelmingly sad (Mandel: 2019). Other interviews, from the same time, reveal the infamously exclusive codes of belonging in metal’s most elitist scenes shifting in similar directions. “If you listen to Black Metal”, said Aaron Weaver of Wolves in the Throne Room, “but you don’t know what phase the moon is in or what wildflowers are blooming, then you have failed…the music is about wild forests, unfettered rivers, nature: furious and vengeful” (Brown: 2018).

I realised that when Weaver spoke of black metal as a “spiritual undercurrent to our world”, the word “undercurrent” was as significant as the term “spiritual”. The clear cold streams and life-giving springs of his lyrics nurture a vision of the natural world that’s cognate with Dylan Thomas’s “force that through the green fuse drives the flower”: the marginal background processes that transform everything (Thomas: 1934). In its North-American forms, this phenomenon is often shaped by musicians’ encounters with indigenous thought and is the polar opposite to the romantic wilderness discourse, as defined by scholars such as William Cronon, with which commentators have associated metal’s rural spaces (Cronon: 1996; 16; Collinson, 2019).

I read interviews from scenes that are usually treated as entirely disconnected from the pine-scented metal of America’s Pacific Northwest, such as British death metal and grindcore, in which modern musicians and fans credit pioneers of the early scene, such as Carcass and Napalm Death, as the reason they and all their friends are environmentally conscious. A direct line can be traced from these bands to today’s thriving EVDM (Environmental Vegan Death Metal) scene which embodies a form of anti-humanism wildly different to any of those in black metal. I thought of the bands who’ve appeared onstage with high-profile environmentalists such as Paul Watson, and the embrace in progressive metal and metalcore of environmental organisations like Greenpeace and Sea Shepherd who, in turn, have made metal their signature soundworld.

It shouldn’t have taken North-Atlantic journeys to make me realise three things. First, that environmentalism is far from marginal to modern metal’s aesthetics and ideologies. Second, that metal is, in turn, central to modern environmental activism. And third, that environmentalism now cuts across all metal’s genre divides: some fans and musicians pursue eco-metal as a cross-generic scene in which punk, hardcore, black metal, grindcore, metalcore, as well as death, doom, black and progressive subgenres of metal, all now coalesce. Thousands of metal musicians across the whole stylistic spectrum are now engaged in pursuing what new materialist theorists such as Donna Haraway and Karen Barad call “Worlding”: building answers to the question “what kind of worlds are needed at this time of ecological crisis?” (Haraway: 2004; Barad: 2015, 396).

Haraway and Barad are among many environmentalist theorists who recognise that a fundamental challenge of living in an era of climate collapse is finding productive ways to process anxiety, anger, loss, and uncertainty. They also emphasise that such a condition must generate alternatives to Enlightenment humanism. Recognising the sheer amount of metal that isn’t urban in origin and evocation, or humanist and individualist in outlook, is a step towards further cross-pollination of heavy music and environmentalist outlooks. After exploring the environmentalist possibilities of assuming that not just the city but also wild, wet, and rural spaces are part of mainstream metal’s imaginary, subsequent sections of this article situate different genres in relation to environmentalism and perceptions of the natural world: first, black metal; then death metal and grindcore; followed by progressive metal and metalcore. The latter section uses a case study from the Faroe Islands to show how disputes which have been conceptualised as pitching environmentalist versus anti-environmentalist perspectives are in fact debates about the nature of environmentalism: contrary to general perception, bands on all sides are deeply invested in ecological questions. The final section uses Neimanis to explore the shifting ontologies and “worldings” that lie behind the flowing water, rain, and fog of modern metal.

II

Beyond the City

The entanglement of metal with forests, waterfalls, oceans, and environmentalism contrasts starkly with the most familiar scholarly visions of metal. The familiar, misleadingly singular, metal origin story is of disaffected youth, in earshot of failing heavy industry, who, amid the anxieties of deindustrialisation, forged a muscular musical style that aestheticised the grind and boom of furnace and factory. Scholarship on metal’s aesthetics, such as Ronald Bogue’s essay in Deleuze on Music, tends to emphasise its 'decidedly “unnatural”, non-organic’ qualities in which ‘the electric guitar [is] treated as an electric industrial machine’. The best ethnographies of metal’s audiences, such as Donna Gaines’ Teenage Wasteland (1991), usually define their subjects by the space they occupy. In Gaines’ case, the first generations of metal’s audience were “Suburbia’s Dead End Kids” who looked to a de-industrialised future like “animals before an earthquake”. Yet there are countless other possible origin stories. Where, for instance, does Bogue’s vision leave Link Wray, the musician of indigenous heritage who, in the late 1950s, pioneered power chords and distorted sound on his family’s chicken farm in rural Maryland? Where does it leave musicians, such as Sylvaine or Osi and the Jupiter, who transpose metal’s aesthetics into acoustic and organic soundworlds, or record labels like Eidenwald, which host acoustic neo-folk and metal alongside dozens of cross-pollinations between the two?

There’s also a long tradition of dismissing metal’s potential for emotional and political expression and therefore its usefulness to scholars. Much of this associates metal crowds with inner-city phenomena such as football hooliganism. This rhetoric originates in classic work from the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, when key texts were penned by scholars of punk such as Angela MacRobbie and Dick Hebdige. Metal is, Hebdige insisted,

a heavily amplified, basic form of rock which relies on the constant repetition of standard guitar riffs. Aficionados can be distinguished by their long hair, denim and ‘idiot’ dancing (again, the name says it all). Heavy metal has fans amongst the student population, but it also has a large working class following. It seems to represent a curious blend of hippy aesthetics and football terrace machismo. (Hebdige 1979: 155)

Other quotes from the movement’s luminaries reinforce this vision of metal as ‘neanderthal’, ‘reactionary’, and ‘fatalistic complaint music’. In the 1980s, MacRobbie theorized a version of cultural studies that subordinates aesthetic concerns to analysis of ‘politically relevant’ commitments. This foregrounded punk’s overt political statements and left little space for other forms of politics or for the task of building a theoretical language to explore more aesthetically nuanced musical expression.

Many bands could be used to show how metal works differently, but the British band Heriot illustrate this well. Their songs are deeply engaged in questions of power in the present and in exploring the moral structures of a society in crisis. Their breakthrough EP, Profound Morality, emerged from the Covid pandemic, and protests injustice, inequality, environmental devastation, and the moral extremes that have come to define modern life. Yet meaning is always made indirectly and allegorically. Music videos express indeterminacy through motion blur and murky light. Songs draw on the imagery of religion and medieval history (as their name, an allusion to the Anglo Saxon death tax, suggests), while never rooting lyrics in a single setting. The coexistence of apparently contradictory aesthetics drags the listener out of time and place: rumbling industrial bass “feels like the end of the world”, production and harsh vocals come directly from ultra-modern metalcore and deathcore, but there are traditional (“old school”) death metal guitars, and medieval-inspiration to the harmonic language and clean vocals. There’s never a locatable speaking voice or personal pronoun, just as problems or aggressors are always indicated by allusion and never named directly. The focus, the band says, is on the question of “how to deal with situations”, not “the situations themselves”. Using poetic means, Heriot’s exploration of the spaces modern culture creates for manipulation and abuse is universalized and made mythic. They explain this allusiveness in terms of futurity: the songs need the power to grow with their listeners, and to fight the right battles far beyond the context of their making. Thanks to cultural studies’ rejection of the aesthetic as a category, the most established methods in the sociology of music have little potential to illuminate the power of this music.   

Despite the rapid rise of Metal Studies over the last decade, the legacy of these dismissals persists. It feeds a condition in which the assumed relevance of punk to mainstream scholarly interests leaves metal (beyond Metal Studies itself) eclipsed and marginal. Books on themes equally relevant to punk and metal, such as the leading study of fanzines, Ripped, Torn, & Cut, still imply metal to be a blunt tool with little to bring to the socio-political table. This scholarship perpetuates stark divides between punk and metal scenes that existed in music in the ‘80s but have been almost entirely dissolved today, when DIY scenes for punk and metal overlap and interlock to produce bands like Ragana, Wolves in the Throne Room, and many others that will feature in this article. Articles that do address metal’s ecological engagements, such as Ian Collinson’s ‘This is the Funeral of the Earth: the Dead-End Environmental Discourses of Australian Ecometal’ (2019), retain this tendency to treat bands in terms of their failure to align with dominant discourses. They therefore miss the nuances in metal’s aesthetic modes.

Leading texts in Metal Studies today argue that metal exists in the context of musicians’ and audiences’ economic marginality. In Metal Rules the Globe, Wallach, Berger, and Greene argue that metal is defined by tensions with industrial modernity: in South-East Asia, metal is “about the unfulfilled desire for the benefits of modernity”, while in wealthy western countries it involves “a sense of relative depravation” and “a desire to lead a life of one’s own choosing” (Wallach, Berger & Greene: 2011, 18). Similarly, the rise of metal in 1980s Brazil is described as occurring “in a milieu fully exposed to modernization but excluded from its fruits” (Wallach, Berger & Greene: 2011, 54; Avelar: 2001, 132). In cities like Belo Horizonte, metal provided a “radical negation” of the entanglement of mainstream popular music with authoritarian politics and expressed an “already disillusioned urban experience” (Avelar: 2001, 126-9). Wallach, Berger, and Greene’s conclusion is that metal is a music

Of anyone who is frustrated by the unkept promises of modernity and willing to embrace a marginalized, transgressive culture to express those feelings. It is the music of the modern project unfulfilled (Wallach, Berger, & Greene: 2011, 19).

These studies imply normative metal performers and consumers who are working class and urban. Metal is “a subcultural solution to cope with deindustrialization, unemployment and low-end jobs” ( ). Such narratives create visions of metal that envisage alternatives to the current world order of industrial capitalism by imagining urban working-class life as heroic.

As noted in the introduction, this goes hand in hand with scholarly focus on metal’s conceptions of power. In How Music Empowers, Steven Gamble establishes the aesthetic modes by which the imagined personae of several metal songs afford empowerment to a listener. The vision these songs conjure is intensely humanist. Gamble envisages metal songs’ protagonists as individualized, stable, and sovereign bodies. These are the humanist visions that underpin modern citizenship, property rights, and legal frameworks, but that posthumanist theory critiques as “Enlightenment figures of coherent and masterful subjectivity” (Haraway 2004: 48) which are incompatible with either a just society or a healthy planet.

The music approached in this article is just as embedded in critique of modern power structures, but takes a wildly different approach. It critiques the city itself, and the visions urban life has generated of what it means both to be human and to live as part of a society. Rather than simply “the modern project unfulfilled”, this might be conceptualized as the music of “the Enlightenment humanist project unfulfilled”. “Radical negation” remains at the music’s core, but, as Bill Peel suggested in Tonight it’s a World we Bury: Black Metal, Red Politics (2023), it isn’t comfortable Norwegian Christianity or or the Catholic political establishment of Brazil that requires negation. It is industrial capitalism and the ordering of the world that underpins it: “Capitalism”, Peel says, “deserves our scorn, and black metal provides it in spades” (Peel: 2023, 13). There is rarely a heroic speaking voice or aspiration to domination. Field recordings situate the listener in rural places, beside flowing rivers or in rain and wind through trees. Though this practice dates back to the 1980s, when bands conceptualised their distinctive soundworlds in terms of distance from the mainstream music industry’s urban centres (as Quorthon of Bathory put it, not being near New York allowed the inclusion of things like “the sound of a seagull flying by. Slayer would never get away with doing that, but we could”) it takes . Lyrics evoke laying down among roots and rain-soaked earth, to become immersed in more-than-human worlds. Vocal styles recall cultural artifacts from Shakespeare to Kafka in which, as people become ‘nature’, the twisting of their speech into brays, bellows, or insect chittering marks the metamorphosis. This is a specific vision of “nature” that is conscious, animate, and intelligent, in which rot, fungus, whale, and rain delimit and undo human agency. Prestige species like tigers, or even wolves, often give way to a vision of nature built from leaf mulch and parasites which rupture and renegotiate the borders of the human. The feminist, trans, and queer activism of many bands has also unsettled the masculinist logic that much literature on metal still assumes.

In one metal genre, at least, nature has not gone unnoticed, and exploring how current scholarship on black metal imagines its spaces and species can help lay the ground for taking these arguments further. In a Black Metal special edition of the critical journal Glossator: Practice and Theory of the Commentary, Steven Shakespeare approached the idea that vocalists, emulating animal and environmental sound, aspire to access nonhuman states directly. He used Adorno’s aesthetics of negation to link this to Frankfurt School critiques:

One might compare [black metal] to the role of modern music envisaged by Adorno: to register and reflect the reverberating shocks created by the machinery of the rational, technological society, and expose us, not to their resolution, but to their unadorned negation: ‘If music is to escape from the nullity that threatens it, the very loss of the raison d’etre I spoke about, then it can only hope to do so if it accomplishes what Schoenberg accomplished in the Survivor from Warsaw – if it confronts the utter negativity, the most extreme, by which the entire complexion of reality is made manifest’ (Shakespeare: 2012, 13). 

This is an illuminating parallel that is, nonetheless, incomplete. Adorno’s vision of negation is an uneasy fit for ecological metal. It involved abandoning the natural world, since Adorno shared Benjamin’s commitment to ‘progress’ as technological evolution. Music, he argued, should reflect the artificiality of modern technological society, and so engagement with nature is undesirable and '“reactionary” except in places he saw as marginal and “under-developed” (Bartok’s Hungary, for instance). Metal envisions a more radical negation, at once technological and natural; it therefore exceeds modernist critique, demanding posthumanist analytic frames.

Shakespeare defends the black metal he features from charges of Romanticism. Contrary to their critics, he shows, songs don’t posit a return to an imagined purity: “it is by following the poisoned traces that ‘A way towards fullness’ is discovered…These woodland paths lead to no clearing of being, but are the passageways of a sovereign decomposition” (Shakespeare: 2012, 16). Falling rain and whipping wind strip away human artifice and recover rough-edged elements of animal being. This leads to the kinds of evocations of decay and growth the band Fauna pursue on the album Rain:

As animals we gather

Around the womb-hole in the ground

Shed this flimsy skin

Ignite our eyes again (Fauna: 2006)

Critiques of black metal that see it as naïve rediscovery of archaic mythologies or primitivist evocation of innocent origins rely, Shakespeare suggests, on the assumption that black metal posits a ‘mythicized unity with nonhuman species, or a romanticized ‘balance’ of nature’. Instead, he draws on lyrics like those from the band Skagos:

In a niche of fauna’s extravagance

we ruled a tundra of malice.

Providence trades hands with exigence

as the wolves chase us into the thicket (Skagos, 2009).

Anthropocentrism’, Shakespeare argues ‘is displaced when the wolves’ affirmative expansion of their niche pushes human subjects into the undergrowth. It is not union, but friction which causes the subversion of anthropocentric dominion’ (Shakespeare: 2012, 20).

Shakespeare’s study is a contribution to the genre known as Black Metal Theory, which folds the aesthetics of black metal into off-kilter contributions to critical theory. The movement has seen some integration with New Materialist approaches, particularly in an essay on Wolves in the Throne Room, “At the Edge of the Smoking Pool of Death”, penned by Timothy Morton. Morton wrote of the ‘forms of speculative metaphysics’ in the band’s ordering of the world, which have ‘performed a very significant distortion of normative environmentalist subjectivity’ (Morton: 2015, 21).

But Black Metal Theory’s willingness to accept Romanticised visions of nature, seen from a masculinist position of sharp-edged self-sufficiency, has itself been critiqued from queer and feminist perspectives: Black Metal Rainbows (2023) situates the “greening” of the genre as part of the current “golden age of pluralistic black metal”. In doing so, it gets much closer to the transformations of ethics and aesthetics that underly many new forms of black metal. Yet even this hasn’t fully recognized the scale of ongoing changes in metal’s conception of the natural world that render it useful for thinking ecocritically.

This attention to black metal’s ventures into wild climates makes it the genre from which a study of metal’s ideologies of environment should start. But where black metal has often been considered to contain the sum of metal’s engagements with landscape and wilderness, this article insists it is only the beginning. Where early black metal used its timeless forests to conjure hyper-individualist escape from the modern world, one of the changes in metal’s new visions of nature is focus on change itself. Bands address, now, the themes the thrash/crust band Lifeless Dark call Forces of Nature’s Transformation: they evoke dynamic natural worlds of rapid change that are active in their own remaking. Bands who dwell with forests, today, are often not seeking escape, but “staying with the trouble”. And bands who evoke seas rarely depict the timeless, empty oceans of literary modernism, but sea whose new behaviour transforms land and life. On their 2015 EP, Stone & Sea, Fen, a band from the East Anglian fenlands, built upon the crumbling coasts of the East of England. This begins on a precipice:

I stand upon the cliff

My hands upon the gate

Watching the waves below

Cause stone to resonate

From here, Fen build entwined visions of inividual mortality and species extinction, wrapped in the storm and swell of atmospheric black metal. “Granite shoulders” are “rent by slews of time” as human certainties “sink into the brine”. In the endtimes, drifting remnants of humanity are little more than silty eddies. This is an ocean apocalypticism familiar to anyone who reads British nature writing from Sebald onwards. As James Rebanks put it in the opening paragraph of 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.

Wherever new meovements in art and thought are preoccupied with the forces of nature’s transformation, metal bands can be found among them.

III

Black Metal’s Quenching Rain

In A Resonant Ecology, the geographer Max Ritts elucidates the aesthetic, political, and environmental functions of black metal in terms of roles it plays in Arctic soundworlds. He recounts exploring the auditory experience of Canada’s northern coasts, which involved meeting Gitk’a’ata hunters who were also metal musicians. He describes seeking out their music and, on their instruction, listening to it while driving along the river basins that were the cradle of their culture. Sound that initially appeared harsh, he writes, soon synchronised with the water flowing nearby until it felt like the moonlit river and the music’s repetitions resonated with one another. ‘I am struck’, he concluded,

by the strange timeliness of its musical vision: an Indigenous North Coast shorn of capitalist and colonial rule, in which an assortment of peoples and animals, waters, laws, and spirits all move in a complex unity (Ritts: 2024, ).   

The black metal band Gyibaaw, Ritts writes, think of their music as opening connection with the world in which the deity they are named after dwells: this is, in their words, “a homecoming”. They refer to black metal as a “noise uprising” that has echoed out during a period of heightened industrial despoliation of indigenous lands, waters, and bodies. Like many indigenous metal bands, they use indigenous instruments, in distinctive rhythmic structures, alongside detailed place narratives. As one of Gyibaaw’s musicians puts it

It was our dream to go to all these ceremonial sites in our territory and record the sounds…—the old fishing sites, the winds, the waves our ancestors paddled in their wiixsoo [war canoes]—and have the sounds playing through every song on our next Gyibaaw album. We wanted to overlap that entire recording with the album songs. Because the voice of our land is so integral to the music, they should exist together. We always felt the album was incomplete without that (Ritts: 2024, ).

These field recordings include the roar of a grizzly bear which is sampled and blended with the human vocalist’s shrieks, to explore Gitk’a’ata visions of shared inter-species natures. Traditional drumming roots the music in the environment of its origin:

We wanted traditional drums and beats to be the backbone and the heartbeat of everything because traditional drums are the heartbeat of our territory, with spiralling, and intergenerational time (Ritts: 2024, ).

From its inception, black metal has sought out these place-based resonances. Tremolo guitar picking, with thin buzz-saw distortion, served to muddy the distinction between percussive and continuous sound. It was conceptualized as echoing the almost-white-noise of a storm. In the lo-fi production of the drums, blastbeats lost their attack and immediacy, becoming a swirling wash with the tape hiss. Croaked and shrieked vocals seemed to abandon the human for glimpses into the worlds of raven or wolf. As well as enhancing the cabin-in-the-woods aesthetics, DIY recording went some way, at least, to free musicians from the usual economics of the music industry.

Ifernach, a Metis musician from the Mi’kmaq Gaspé peninsula and part of the movement known as Metal Noir Québécois writes that until he discovered the evocations of nature in black metal he had been inattentive to the landscapes around him, but ‘suddenly, everything became clear – it was a revelation’: “When I found Bathory, I felt the Scandinavian landscape screaming through the music. This is what I try to achieve with Ifernach: allowing my own land to speak through me”. Ifernach’s work began with self-released albums, but, as indigenous black metal gains ever greater presence, his early releases, such as his split with Pan-Amerikan Native Front, have been re-released on the indigenous record label Night of the Palemoon.

Another indigenous black metal musician, Sgah'gahsowáh, who records as Blackbraid, released his first album in 2022 and talked at that time about his music being carried along on ‘a massive wave of native black metal this past year or two’. ‘Metal is based’, he says, ‘in emotion and conflict, which indigenous people are no strangers to, so I think a lot of us are drawn to music like metal or punk from a very early age’.

As a child, Blackbraid was adopted by a white family in Mexico. “There are so many displaced Native Americans all over this continent”, he says, “and it’s a very common misconception that all of us grew up in a reservation and had access to tribal communities. I want to empower those people as well as all the people that are enrolled and living on reservations” ( ). As soon as he was able, he returned North to live in the Adirondack mountains of upstate New York, where he worked as a carpenter before making music full-time. He frequently stresses his music’s connection to this landscape:

I’ve lived in the wilderness and been an outdoorsman for most of my life…I tan, hunt, fish…I’m looking out of my window right now at 30,000 acres of wilderness…So, with Blackbraid, I kind of wanted to bring that to people through music…[to] let them see the world the way I see it ( ).

Blackbraid insists that the aesthetic moves he makes - from black-metal corpse paint to indigenous war paint, and from Satanic opposition to Christianity to decolonial resistance to Christian conversion - are small and obvious steps to take. 

Many bands, such as the Sámi project, Ruohtta, pursue similar logics, and take names from deities connected to specific places or environmental features. These include mountains and rivers but also wind directions or seasonal rains, whose personifications Christian mission interpreted as ‘demons’ and sought to banish from the landscape. Black metal’s “aesthetic heathenism” is adapted into an anti-colonial rallying cry, responding to colonizers’ insistence that deities exist only in sacred texts and a metaphysical beyond. The Sámi festival, Rutta Rutta, has, like many indigenous events, become a focal point for global indigenous metal, with bands such as the Polynesian Shepherd’s Reign, making the journey to perform. 

Indigenous culture, and the aesthetics of Native American Black Metal, informs the most commercially successful branch of the genre on the continent: the Cascadian black metal of the Pacific Northwest. Wolves in the Throne Room were the first band to break out from this scene. Alongside the tremolo picking and raw production characteristic of black metal they built acoustic passages, ambient elements, and field recordings into a rich auditory ecology. As has become common for Cascadian bands, their first recordings were circulated with moss and leaves for packaging, while gigs took place deep in forests, without a stage, and often without the precise location advertised. One early live review explained that Wolves in the Throne Room did justice to the chaos of nature as opposed to the ‘serene, peaceful…sunny days and baby seals’ of ‘Greenpeace types’ ( ).

Soon, the band lived on a ten-acre, off-grid, forest farm with livestock and ‘a hundred varieties of veg’. Seeking an organic aesthetic, they rejected the most technological aspects of modern metal (such as recording on computers and using triggered drums or clicktracks), and discussed how this produced “the sound of paradox, ambiguity, confusion, being caught between two worlds that can’t be reconciled”. Sadness and anger at disconnection from the natural world, they argued, is fundamentally what black metal is about (though ‘we don’t romanticize the past, we criticize the present’). Their music is ‘an attempt to deal with intense feelings of sadness’, and the darkest aspects of modern life, not through acquiescence but catharsis: a way to move constructively through pain. ‘For me’, said Aaron Weaver,

it would not feel authentic to revel in that intense darkness that black metal accesses…I view it as a shamanic journey of sorts. The role of the shaman in traditional societies is through trance and through ritual to journey to the underworld and engage in a harrowing and dangerous journey in order to come back with some sort of knowledge…for the benefit of the community. I think that black metal is best viewed as that sort of process. You engage with these extremely dark ideas and feelings in order to gain some knowledge and power and in order to move beyond.

This dark optimism is often expressed through the idea that the burning glare of extractive economics can be extinguished by fog, rain, or snow. The song ‘I will lay down my bones among the rocks and roots’ opens with ‘great fires’ that ‘rage outside of this wooded sanctuary’ until ‘quenched by a purifying rain’.

In other interviews, the band refer to Scandinavian black metal as deliberately and provocatively ‘unbalanced’: ‘the sound of utter torment: believing to one’s core that winter is eternal’. Cascadian black metal in this vision seeks balance: ‘we temper the blind rage of black metal’ because ‘our relationship with the natural world is a healing force in our lives’: 

To us the driving impulse of Black Metal is more about deep ecology than anything else and can best be understood through the application of eco-psychology. Why are we sad and miserable? Because our modern culture has failed…to sustain our humanity, our spirituality…Modernity has transformed us, our minds, bodies and spirit, into an alien life form; one not suited to life on earth.

The purpose Weaver conceptualizes as ‘shamanistic’ has become central to hundreds of environmentalist black metal bands. From Agalloch and Ash Borer to Wake and Weakling, bands in the Pacific Northwest embrace forests and rivers as places of sustenance and decay, where local ideas become universal themes. Weaver describes Cascadian black metal as ‘striving to operate on the mythic level’, using local materials to conjure ‘the energetic reality of place’. Many insist, as the band Fauna put it, that to deal with environmental loss ‘we need to forge something completely new rather than pine away for what has been lost, for what we never had’.

This vision exists in black metal everywhere in the Americas, including the forests of Chile and the mountains of Peru. In Kentucky, the folk-tinged metal of Panopticon is inspired by opposition to horrors inflicted on stolen Cherokee land: from genocide to modern methods of mountain-top removal which mean that “in just a few short years we have destroyed mountains older than time” (Panopticon: 2012). But some of the most revealing manifestations come from inner-city bands whose music traces diminished and twisted versions of nature into urban space. New York bands, such as Krallice and Yellow Eyes, explore the impossibility of sequestering nature, and treat water as the conduit that renders cities pregnable to wildness. Their music is, in ethos and intent, so close to Astrida Neimanis’ vision of a posthumanist hydrocommons that its analysis will provide this article’s final case study, when music and theory flow together.   

IV

Radiation Leach & Death Metal

In comparison to black metal, death metal depicts few rural environments, yet its ‘new maps of hell’ (Taylor: 2009) still require ecocritical readings. The settings of death metal are more often the abattoir or operating table than the forest or mountain top. When they venture outdoors, songs and album art often operate in the annihilated earth of a spent planet or the industrial horror of an open-pit mine. The time of death metal, the Brazilian literary scholar Idelber Avelar says, is a “futuristic eschatological matrix”: “always the temporality of the last day”. Death metal, he insists, “puts up its tent” upon the ruins of progress, refusing to accept the binary of capitalist advance or nostalgic preservation on which contempary hopes and dreams are built (Avelar: 2001, 130-1). Vocals don’t so much reject the human for the animal but contort the voice as if tortured beyond breaking point.

As with black metal, however, recent decades have seen both musical means and ideological purpose diversify. Current innovators, Ulcerate, insist these changes can be understood through the idea that death metal is still the metal of death, but that what this can mean has been dramatically expanded. Many bands focus less on the event of death itself and more on its place in the human condition and its effect on the psyches of the living. On albums like Stare Into Death and be Still, Ulcerate use staggeringly complex music, performed with unconventional techniques, to conjure pain, tragedy, release, terror, and melancholy in explorations of how ideas of endings inflect the worlds we live through. Soaring beauty is built from building blocks of unmitigated ugliness, just as, they posit, a healthy life can be built from orientation towards finitude. Much of this music, like that of Heriot, sits easily alongside Weil and Schopenhauer’s insistence that our most ethical act, and most significant path to understanding, is to dwell with the suffering of others.

As early as 1990, death metal bands were giving this focus on suffering and endings environmentalist twists. Albums like Polluted Inheritance’s Ecocide focussed on the suffering of the planet and owed debts to metallic hardcore bands, such as Earth Crisis and Liberator, who released albums and graphic novels in which animal liberation activists brushed up against the machinery of the state. Grindcore, too, became associated with animal rights thanks to the vegetarian (and later vegan) activism of early scene leaders Carcass and Napalm Death.

Today, numerous bands explore environmental apocalypse, anthropogenic extinctions and the human killing of nonhuman animals. ‘Environmental Vegan/Vegetarian Death Metal’ has become an apocalyptic and anti-humanist genre of its own. On albums like The Anthropocene Extinction and Terracite, Cattle Decapitation depict meat-eating humans as parasites chomping their way to self-destruction. Their activism is prominent in media coverage, whether they’re ‘crusading against the meat industry, animal testing, environmental destruction or transphobia’. Their talent, this coverage often suggests, is to use their immersive aural bombardment – at once intricate, melodic, dissonant, and unremittingly vulgar - to generate an imminent sense that what could otherwise seem ‘abstract far-away injustice’ is a visceral ‘personal danger’.

This apparent nihilism has been critiqued, like the apparent romanticism of black metal, as a dead-end discourse, offering little to mainstream environmentalists. Such readings are in keeping with the Environmental Humanities’ ever greater distrust of tropes that read as apocalyptic. But these views rely on the idea that literal readings of lyrics are enough to determine what music is and does. Interviews with pioneering bands attest to ways in which, far from leading to despair, this dystopian vision has created communities of action. ‘One thing I wanted to get into with you’, the music journalist Matt Bacon began, in an interview with Bill Steer of Carcass,

is obviously you’re a vegetarian and have been for a long time, and I’m a vegetarian pretty much because of Carcass and Napalm Death and I have a dozen friends who have the same story – what is that like to be this weirdly influential person because of your dietary choices? (Bacon: 2017)

Protagonists have looked back on the early scene in ways that attend to the strength of its community and its ‘more than human’ fields of operation. Jason Netherton, bass player with Dying Fetus in the 1990s and Misery Index in the 2000s, has written books and articles exploring the notion of community in the death metal underground. In a piece coauthored with Nathan Snaza, he took an explicitly New Materialist stance on how community was conceived and how death metal’s apparent misanthropy should be interpreted.

Netherton and Snaza argue that the materiality of tape trading and zines was crucial to communities built on the global postal system. They show how tapes were agential in the conception of such communities, which they present as the very definition of scattered, posthuman ‘being-in-common’ rather than the humanist ‘common being’ of essentialist communities such as nations. Death metal’s commonality, they argue, was built on a concern with the ‘shared finititude…that unites all living beings’ and a ‘revaluation of the human’s animality’. In recording Snaza’s own experience, they explicitly integrate animal solidarities into this frame:

The copy of Carcass’s Reek of Putrefaction [Snaza] first heard…unsettled his sense of what music was supposed to sound like, which lead to a fascination that ultimately re-configured his ethics. Like a number of others, he became a vegetarian in part due to his engagements with Carcass.

The authors present the dystopian onslaught of metal’s most brutal genre as brimming with utopian possibilities:

What we think death metal’s early years demonstrate is that forms of community that are – in partial ways at least – at odds with humanist social formations can be nurtured within capitalist, humanist systems. Death metal is not, in any way, outside of the system it criticizes and rejects. But it doesn’t perform itself in the expected ways, and thus reveals the possibility of disrupting and redirecting the system.

Implied in their argument is a critique of previous death metal scholarship which had argued that despite the seemingly anti-social nature of the music, the scene fostered strong traditional communities. In fact, they argue, the construction of death metal communities is a genuine threat to humanist forms of identity through its total rejection of their ordering of the world. This music dwells

with loss, decay, violence and death in ways that modern societies have not, and this difference may – given contemporary geopolitics and ecological catastrophe – make all the difference in the world.

There are many examples of this at work among the underground bands I was introduced to on my Arctic journeys. Where the black metal of the far North receives far more international publicity, death metal is also a characteristic sound of these spaces. This is perhaps unsurprising since the genre thrives wherever extractive capitalism and climate breakdrown are most existentially threatening. Unearthly Rites, a death metal band from Arctic Finland, 1000km North of Helsinki, released their first full-length album in 2024. Their music is gruesomely ugly, relentlessly heavy, and driven by desire to draw attention to the horrors of heavy industry in regions remote from public scrutiny. Unlike black metal’s environmentalists, they don’t so much conjure alternative ontologies, but force attention onto the bleakest realities of the present. Yet they stress that this is music about the natural world: “surprise, surprise, where there’s interesting minerals there’s usually rich diversity in nature too”.

In “Deep Drilling Earth’s Crust”, the band’s singer, Sisli uses her deepest guttural roars to describe “splintering cracks” in stolen Sámi land. This terrain has been “prepared for chaos” by the annihilation of its flora and fauna. She conjures drills “tearing light” into “places where darkness should reign” and sings of “heavy metals and radiation leach” poisoning every creature that drinks from Arctic waterways. “A mine”, as the band’s drummer puts it, “is like an open wound that will continue to bleed for centuries”. Some of their most vicious condemnation, on songs like “Fuck Ecofascism”, is reserved for those who direct blame towards overpopulation in the global south, rather than overconsumption in the global North. They condemn, too, the greenwashing that celebrates the mining of minerals used for so-called “clean” technologies to fuel capitalist visions of a “green transition”. The closing salvo of Unearthly Rites’ album is a galvanising call to “fight for what is left”. The album name, Ecdysis (the term for the shedding of an insect’s exoskeleton and its growth into a new form), expresses “deep disappointment with modern humanity” but hope for, and belief in, transformative possibilities.

Unearthly Rites’ music is among the heaviest in this article. When major metal review sites, such as Angry Metal Guy, praised Ecdysis, they wrote of “nasty, fetid reptile shit that sticks to your ribs and cakes your lungs with toxic fumunda cheese”. “The guitar tone”, this review continued, “is ragged and huge, the bass is putrid, and those vocals by Sisli are like the gates of hell flung open with unspeakable atrocities spewing forth.” In “Headbanging as Resistance or Refuge”, Paul Henry and Marylouise Caldwell provide a framework to interpret the appeal of this barrage. “Catharsis”, they argue, “hinges on a specific-relevant emotional trigger…a strong sense of disempowerment experienced vicariously”. Collective consciousness of this disempowerment is key, they argue, to musical experiences that amount to ritual. These (unearthly) rites are built on interactions between band and audience, and shared knowledge of how to respond to musical events: circle pits, raising the horns, and reacting to breakdowns are ritual events. Henry and Caldwell draw on theatre studies to show how catharsis results in rejuvenation: “emotional relief in which participants purge themselves of uncomfortable emotions such as anger, pity and fear, or accumulated tension…self-expansion in which participants become inspired to overcome their own self-limits and free themselves from oppression”. Their interview subjects speak of metal forging the belief that “even the smallest person can change the course of history”.

The Gramscian phrase “Pessimism of the Intellect, Optimism of the Will” seems to capture something of the function of Unearthly Rites’ live performance. In the face of the overwhelming financial clout of the mines and the hegemonic culture of extractive capitalism, the music’s extraordinary sensory overload provides shared rituals of catharsis for processing eco-anxiety and rage. “It’s a grim world”, Sisli says, and “these are grim times. We need more grim music”.

V

Two Species of Whalecore

This section of the article asks what happens if we conceptualise not just the work of Gojira, whose activism on behalf of whales has been widely publicized, but of the Faroese band Hamferð, whose songs express their deep knowledge of marine biology, as “Whalecore”. In ‘A Message Etched on Broken Ships: Radical Environmentalism and Extreme Ecometal’ (2022), Ian Collinson showed how metal bands have found ready allies in Sea Shepherd. Gojira, Architects, In Hearts Wake, Parkway Drive, Divine Chaos, and Klogr are standout names among many others who have committed their support to the environmentalist organisation. The music Sea Shepherd uses, on playlists such as Rock the Ocean and compilations like For the Ocean (2014), has, in turn, been unusually metal oriented. Collinson argues that a misanthropic politics of transgression characterizes both Sea Shepherd and the extreme metal genres from which most ecometal comes, allowing each to amplify the other without compromising its status as oppositional to the commercial and political mainstream.

What hasn’t so far been recognized, however, is that metal bands stand on both sides of major environmental debates and conflicts in the Faroe Islands. Media coverage tends to present these conflicts in terms of environmentalist groups and their supporters, including Sea Shepherd’s metal-bands, battling with opponents who cling to destructive traditions at any environmental cost. In reality, all sides are using metal to pursue environmentalist goals, just with very different visions of how Faroese seas can best be protected.

Sea Shepherd’s approach to environmentalism was born from the 1970s bureaucratization and perceived ‘mainstreaming’ of traditional environmentalist organizations such as Greenpeace. In the hands of founder, Paul Watson (who had previously been instrumental in the growth of Greenpeace), Sea Shepherd ‘cultivated a heroic, piratical and adventuring image’. With skilled use of social media, and a knack for avoiding successful prosecutions, Sea Shepherd has managed to sustain this rogueish image despite collaborations with numerous state agencies and official institutions. Activities range from spectacular, telegenic anti-whaling interventions to more everyday beach clean ups around the world. 

Some of Sea Shepherd’s most distinctive rhetorical strategies have involved blunt misanthropic or anti-cultural assertions. Watson insists that ‘The pyramids, the Old masters, the symphonies, sculpture, architecture, film, photography…All of these things are worthless to the Earth, when compared with any one species of bird, or insect, or plant’. This ethos shapes the behaviour of many activists. In regions such as Faroe, organisers have established, on arrival, a stark binary between themselves and local populations: ‘we don’t compromise…we’re not here for cultural exchange’. This antagonism has been enormously successful at gathering social media support, but drastically counter-productive for saving whales. It has prompted extreme antagonism from many islanders which has, in turn, transformed the declining tradition of Faroese pilot whaling into a revived centrepiece of some Faroese identities: a core of young, nationalist, support now bends traditional rules in unprecedented ways.

Faroese lifestyles are among the most sustainable in the western world, with strong traditions of rural subsistence and informal economy. The arrival by plane of urban activists preaching the evils of Faroese life has therefore been bewildering to many islanders. Islanders have compared Sea Shepherd’s lack of cultural nuance to Greenpeace’s divisive anti-seal hunting campaigns of the 1980s; those endeavours were later acknowledged, including by some of the activists involved, as disastrous because of their unintended impact on the viability of Inuit communities, which dragged thousands of people previously living sustainable lives into destructive global food systems. As one Faroe islander put it when addressing Sea Shepherd activists, ‘it is you who polluted the whales and now you come here and impose your lifestyle upon us!’ Activists accuse islanders of ‘ecological imperialism’, while islanders accuse activists of ‘cultural imperialism’. Each generalises the other’s attitude as ‘evil’ or ‘naïve’.

This conflict has been fought out through metal more than any other art form. On one side, some of the most commercially successful metal bands on the planet, such as Gojira and Architects, have galvanized global audiences behind Sea Shepherd’s cause. On the other, Faroese metal bands, such as Týr and Hamferð, have become a prominent means by which Faroese perspectives have reached wider audiences. Some have been heavily boycotted by Sea Shepherd and their supporters. 

Gojira are currently the most prominent environmental activists in global metal. Brought up near French coasts and forests, they recall collecting driftwood as children only to come home with hands blackened by crude oil or ear infections from polluted water. They are now, as the music journalist Matt Mills put it, ‘screaming for the salvation of a polluted world’ and doing so with enough commercial appeal to become the first metal band ever to perform at an Olympic opening ceremony.

In 2005, Gojira released ‘Flying Whales’ which has been a staple of their setlist ever since. It opens with recorded whale song, before plunging into groove-heavy riffing and blending, in Gojira’s typical genre-blending style, elements of death, thrash, and nu metal with the succession of lurching breakdowns that has become distinctive of modern metalcore. All this underpins a dreamsequence in which a protagonist follows the migration of whales across the skies to seek salvation for the planet. This narrative echoes tropes familiar from environmentalist art, such as Paul Bloomer’s woodcut “I Dreamt I Saw Geese Flying Through Northern Lights”.

Whales soon adorned band merchandise, becoming the key icon around which Gojira’s imagery grew. Inflatable whales are thrown around at gigs, while a facebook fangroup with 20,000 members is called ‘Gojira Whaleposting’ and supplements the usual forum guidelines such as ‘respect all members’ with rules including ‘No plastic bags in the sea’. By 2011, a song, ‘Of Blood and Salt’, and promised EP were explicitly dedicated to Sea Shepherd, and in 2012, they invited Watson to join them onstage at a music festival in Germany, where he had been detained at the request of the Costa Rican government. Ever since, Gojira’s social media has promoted Sea Shepherd’s campaigns and the organisation’s merchandise has been sold at gigs, while Gojira’s music has been featured on Sea Shepherd’s official playlists. Gojira, along with British metalcore band Architects, have been presented by Sea Shepherd’s leaders as ‘ambassadors for the ocean’.

In May 2016, Metal Hammer magazine ran a special edition on musicians and activism, with the tagline ‘First the Oceans…Now the World: Metal Takes a Stand’. Inside, an article on Gojira (‘Making Waves’) sat alongside one on Architects (‘Seaside Solution’).  Vegan and activist, Architects are much more openly invested in mainstream politics than either Gojira or Sea Shepherd: despite being a Green Party member, their lead singer, Sam Carter, voiced vocal support for Jeremy Corbyn’s brand of the Labour movment, appearing with him on a magazine cover and inviting him on stage with the band. Sea Shepherd, however, is the cause to which Architects have committed most time and energy. In the Metal Hammer article, Carter explained their appeal. ‘I love the fact that someone cared so much about an animal’s life that they would put it before theirs’. He realised after encountering Watson’s work that he could help by going onstage to ‘talk about whales dying’.

As Collinson notes, the relationships between Gojira, Architects, and Sea Shepherd amount to a ‘complex interplay of band and organization’, including ‘exchange of audiences’, which ‘amplifies the reach and effect of both the music and the activism’. He compares elements of paradox in Sea Shepherd’s explanations of their activities, including the idea of ‘aggressive non-violence’, to the pose of ‘apolitical politics’ that often distinguishes metal’s critiques of mainstream society from the more overtly political agendas of punk (this reading fits Gojira, but is more of a stretch for Architects).

What has been missing from these discussions is the other side of whalecore’s coin. Several Faroese metal bands, including Svartmálm, Sic, Hamferð, and Týr, are steeped in island culture, folklore, and the more-than-human life of ocean. One striking thing about Faroese culture in general, but these bands in particular, is the amount of ecological knowledge, and the deep understanding of historically sustainable social formations, that exists within them. Svartmálm’s first album was an exploration of Faroese culture, setting work by the Faroese poet and artist Øssur Johannesen whose exhibitions, with titles like ‘Conversations with fog’, are focused on ocean climates. Hamferð’s vocalist Jón Aldará is a biologist and bird conservationist who has published on the egg density of skuas and written acclaimed songs about specific duck and seabird species.

Hamferð’s environmental engagement goes much further than Aldará’s expertise. They incorporate island elements ‘relating to weather and culture’ and make the ocean, and human struggle on rough seas into both their lyrical content and soundworld. They cite influences from Faroese psalm melodies to Melville, the sound of fog horns, and historic seafaring disasters. The experience of past seafarers on stormy oceans conjures analogies to current ecological crises: ‘the ability to push through even the darkest of experiences...to see the potential for hope when all seemed lost’. They’ve performed live in natural coastal venues such as the huge seacave, Klæmintsgjógv, and chose to incorporate the islands into one release by recording (and filming) with acoustic instruments on a mountaintop during a solar eclipse. In this way, they draw in the natural world as musical collaborator.

Their ‘whalecore’ is less glossy than that of Gojira or Architects. Indeed, they describe their song ‘Hvølja’ (Whaleskin) as their ‘darkest and ugliest song…a sonic and lyrical representation of the world being violently ripped apart by monstrous currents’. Their most tortuously structured song is an attempt to understand the psyches of those involved in a whaling disaster of 1915. Aldará ties this song to Faroese ideals of community, and traditional ways of life which had to confront danger and death at the hands of the elements:

[that’s] a very personal thing for me…It’s such a small community here that death is always very close, as close as joy in life…because you’re basically getting what you can out of the land and out of the sea.

Sea Shepherd and their supporters have called for travel boycotts of the Faroes as well as demanding that all artists, but particularly those, like Hamferð, who have songs about whaling, denounce the whale hunt or face boycotts themselves. Island music festivals, such as G!, have been boycotted too, with global bands such as Metallica lobbied to instruct the metal community to stay away. But it’s Faroes’ other major metal band, Týr, who have fought back most strongly and therefore raised the greatest ire. In 2016, Týr’s frontman, Heri Joensen, uploaded a photo to facebook which showed him cutting whale meat at home. International uproar and immediate calls for boycott followed. He issued a lengthy statement explaining how different Faroese views on the food chain were from the perspectives familiar to those more thoroughly embedded in global food chains. This only served to exacerbate controversy, and Sea Shepherd’s calls for Týr to be boycotted met with instant success. Venues cancelled shows and issued statements: ‘such people’ one insisted ‘will naturally not play on our stage’.

To be a Faroese metal band today is to face the ever-present possibility of boycott. This is despite Faroese bands evoking an immersion in the more-than-human world and experience of more-than-human being that is a vital form of environmentalism. Faroese artforms, with their rich ecological vocabulary and nuanced relationship to the natural world, provide many such environmental outlooks which are all too easily lost in global media’s cartoonish image of conscienceless whale slaying. Attending to both sides of musical discourse in Faroe can show the centrality of metal to environmentalism: wherever opinions fall on the environmental questions at stake, it is telling that metal carries this debate in ways no other artforms attempt.

VI

Songs of Water

Far more environmental and oceanic evocation exists than that mentioned in this article, from post-metal oceanic subgenres, including bands such The Ocean, and Giant Squid, to Ecstatic Black Metal bands, such as Agriculture (e.g. “The Glory of the Ocean”), and progressive metal bands, like Iotunn (e.g. “Waves Below”). Marshes and wetlands have become a place of metal all their own, as on Conjurer’s celebrated album Mire, or WinterheartH’s song “Marshland” from the Newfoundland-themed album Riverbed Empire. Metal influenced by folk music or folklore would provide dozens more examples, such as Green Lung’s “Born to a Dying World”, where climate apocalypse is seen from the drowned church spire of a rural English village. The rock band Dool emphasised these affinities when they turned, for the first time, to metal techniques and production in seeking, on The Shape of Fluidity (2024), to show that we must be “fluid as water” to navigate the chaos of our present: the album is filled with other species, lungs full of ocean, and lead singer, Raven’s, exploration of their identity as a person born intersex.

All these conjurings of a wet, warmed planet are partly a matter of historical context. They contrast starkly with the ways in which, when 1980s metal ventured outdoors, it was into the dry cold of eternal freeze. The anxiety they addressed was nuclear winter, rather than melting ice caps. Today, not just winter, but the melt and flood of spring, as well as the liquifying rot of autumn, frame metal’s seasonalities. As Skagos put it, “Fungi lurch forward for a final gulping breath/All is returned to the earth and the rain will fall and fall”. Twenty-first century metal has got ever wetter, and every band mentioned in this article could be replaced with a dozen alternatives who also recognise, with Francis Ponge, that “between the water of tears and seawater there can’t be much difference”.

Across the same time-frame ecocriticism and environmental theory have also dampened. In the hands of posthumanist phenomenologists such as Astrida Neimanis, and in new theoretical currents such as hydrofeminism, human bodies – as porous as trees or lakes – become items of water and fragments of weather systems. Neimanis’s goal is to “inaugurate new ontologies” and develop “imaginaries that might allow us to relate differently” to the teeming array of lifeforms for which water provides connection and commonality. She seeks alternatives to ideas of a single sovereign consciousness, favouring a hydrocommons built from attentiveness to seeping, salivating, seething, suppurating, and water’s many means of revealing the porous nature of every entity.

Any band mentioned above could be subjected to hydrofeminist readings, but in integrating their watery rurality with urban space, the New York black metal band Yellow Eyes offer a particularly useful example. On Sick with Bloom (2015), each song is set around a different body of poisoned water. Pond, sluice, inlet, mangrove, salt flat, and ice melt are each poisoned by their urban intermingling. Through field recordings, which feature the frogs of a marsh, a thunderstorm, and wind-driven trees and percussion, the forests of Connecticut play substantive roles in the performance: “You can feel”, the press release reads, “the surrounding wilderness seeping through into the music”. The first track conjures polluted manmade ponds, with “the nausea of the carpet slick” that coats their surface. It describes the “black seeds and blinded shrimp” held, as if in amber, within the leery beams of spotlights. Everything is out of place: the fish would shed their scales to be beyond the pond, but the singer finds “true North” in the pull of the water and a desire to be engulfed. The second track evokes rivers concreted over, with “the nagging of the torrent/hissing somewhere underground”. Later, the album’s mangrove swamps are “dense lungs of the waterline”, breathing corruption, while a human, sequestered by the glass of a train window, passes above. But the human’s gut is loam and roots and “wants the smell of mud”. In every song, human and elemental forces coagulate and cross till indistinguishable. Human organs think and feel, desire and recoil while, through the field recordings, marsh and wind perform the songs. The only absence from this manifold agential web is a controlling, decision making, mind in the humanist mold. Such attitudes echo the quote from Neimanis that opened this article, with its evocations of “a wild wetland in our gut [and] rivulets forsaken making their way from our insides to out”.

Yellow Eyes return us to the city via suburban waterways. Their urban space is defined not by triumphant conquest but by the grotesque artificiality that seeps from streets and sewers into spaces once wild. This is a world re-ordered. It is transformed both from heavy metal cities like the 1970s Birmingham of Black Sabbath and Judas Priest, and from the empty romanticised wilds of black metal’s early years. The fact that metal’s diversification has taken hundreds of bands into territories more familiar from environmentalist thought marks the genre as particular. An article approaching these themes for another genre would likely take a different form and might, perhaps, have less material to work with. Few in the environmentalist community, and perhaps not many more in the metal scene, are aware either of the scale and range of metal’s existing contributions, or of its future potential. The first step in achieving that potential is naming it. Hence this article’s efforts to recognise communities of action created and empowered by forms of heavy music which have too often been written about as the noise of disengaging or dropping out, rather the sound of opting into something better.