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Through the prism of intimacy, this chapter discusses how experiences of pain and loss in relation to bereavement by suicide is expressed in the black metal music and lyrics by Danish band Orm. Orm's 2019-album Ir ‘verdigris’, entangles the emotional complex and personal relations to the local, natural surroundings of the island Bornholm, including a named tree and lake, as well as local folklore and Norse mythology. As part of fieldwork, the author muddles with intimacy to define an approach sensitive enough to deal with strong and unspeakable emotions, including the idea of cultural intimacy and public embarrassment related to the issue of suicide. The author also reflects on how my participation in the pain of others informs the interpretation. The chapter suggests that Orm's black metal is doing important pain work, opening to listeners a path towards disembarrassment.

This chapter explores how medieval signifiers function in black metal’s musical style, lyrics, and album imagery, specifically albums using woodcut engravings. It analyses how the word ‘medieval’ functions in ­discourses about those albums, including reviews, magazines, forum discussions, and YouTube comments. The analysis combines qualitative close readings with quantitative analyses of word frequencies, indicating which albums have provoked the term ‘medieval’ most. I then show which other terms are closely paired with it – descriptive adjectives, analogies and associative imagery, and various aesthetic judgments. I compare these findings with close music analyses to offer stylistic explanations for black metal’s enduring fascination with the medieval. Finally, the chapter explores how black metal’s associations with the medieval also intersect with notions of cultural purity and political controversies within medieval studies itself.

While the theme of death in the popular music subgenre of black metal has been written about descriptively, it is less frequent to find conceptual philosophical or theological analyses of death. In this piece, I aim to show how black metal's presentation of death lies in line with death as negation, instilled with strong links to Christianity's mystical apophatic theology. I will argue that this view on death shows it cannot be properly expressed in terms of affirmative language. Even where death is treated as a physical death, rather than metaphorical, it is a celebrated expression of negation. However, unlike the Christian apophatic tradition, black metal's death is not a renunciation of the physical; rather it is a complement to it. In a complex sense, even negating negations, black metal's expression of death is disturbing precisely because of its dual acceptance of death as metaphor and as physically fully realised.

This contribution is an investigation into the palpable connection of extreme metal music and concepts of death, dying and mortality. Like other dark subcultures, metal has an intense infatuation with the macabre; many of its subcultures seek to uncover meaning through musical exploration into varying dark themes that emerge when thinking about death and what lies beyond the bounds of existence. From the abrasive and animalistic blood lust of death metal to the melancholic textures of black metal and the sonic void evoked in doom metal, extreme metal is a catalyst through which fans of the macabre can explore many perceptions and conceptions of corporeal fragility; the consuming pain of life, of death, and of knowing; and the existential notion of the ungraspable abyss. This chapter explores these varying conceptualisations of death in extreme metal culture, their sonic representations and their cathartic consolation: delving into the psychoanalytic reasoning and embodied sound of death.

Black metal has the power to stimulate the mind, to bring the listener to the very edge of an intellectual nihilistic abyss. While the experience of black metal can be one of transcendence and annihilation, it is nevertheless rooted in the embodiment of the listener. Black metal’s primal sound and aesthetic are closely associated with the chaotic lower abdomen, including the generative organs and the bowels, which in medieval cosmology represented torment, melancholia, and demonic forces. Black metal bowellism translates this medieval visceral inversion into an expression of the Bakhtian Grotesque, a gleeful and anarchic rejection of the hierarchical order. This chapter connects this metaphysical inversion to a desire to return to an imagined medieval world, but one of dissolution and decay rather than a reconstitution of older hierarchies.