Black Metal

Aside from its mainstream popularity in Scandinavia, black metal has largely been an underground sub-genre of metal since the 1980s, characterized by tremolo-picked guitars and blast beats.

2011 saw a rise in mainstream interest in the genre in the United States; even the New Yorker wrote about the it. Liturgy vocalist Hunter-Hunt Hendrix sparked controversy amongst the black metal community when he published the essay "Transcendental Black Metal."