Lands forlorn: of fictional lands in Black Metal
Just to get you hooked until the end: I’ll conclude this post by pointing to the first fictional land in modern black metal — one that’s completely overlooked. (SPOILER: It isn’t Blashyrkh!)
Now, to the actual article...
Fictional lands and lore have been a creative device since forever — Middle-earth, the Age of Hyboria, Arrakis... Worldbuilding isn’t just a feature of fiction; it’s a methodology in itself. It helps writers push their imagination further, producing more vivid and meaningful results for their fantasy worlds.
Black metal, being part of the big family of escapist music genres — like synthwave, industrial, dungeon synth, and metal in general — is not immune to this. In fact, it benefits from it in much the same way as fantasy literature does. Creating a fictional world can inspire lyrics, shape soundscapes and atmospheres, and define visual style and artwork for a band.
I don’t know much about the use of original fictional worlds in first-wave black metal. Maybe there are a few songs here and there that do it, but using worldbuilding consistently across a concept album or an entire discography really started with the second wave of black metal. Yeah — we’re giving those Norse guys a lot of credit again, some might complain... but it is what it is. Maybe King Diamond came close to it, but his work leans more toward horror stories than fully built fictional lands.
So, just to be clear, here I’ll be focusing on fictional worlds that unify all — or at least most — of a band’s creative output.
For most people, the first band to truly do this was Immortal. Most of their discography takes place in the land of Blashyrkh — a world set on a frozen moon, shrouded in darkness and filled with frostbitten kingdoms, as depicted in many of their albums artwork (check the lyrics of "Blacker Than Darkness" if you wanna confirm it is a moon). In Demonaz’s own words, from an interview with Nuclear Blast:
"My inspiration to start IMMORTAL came from the environment that I grew up in. The cold winter, the dark woods, the mighty mountains and glaciers. I wanted something unique to bind the lyrics and music together. I created Blashyrkh, meaning 'The realm of all darkness and cold‘. The harsh, cold and dark side of nature is a never ending inspiration". As his punchlines proves again, this world enabled Immortal to give an encompassing concept and fuel for the bands longlasting creativity."
While Immortal is better known — and released their first official material earlier than the other bands we’ll discuss — another Swedish band, actually formed a year before Immortal (that is, in 1989), was treading a similar path. Less focused on winter themes and more on mysticism and evil, we have Ophthalamia — the brainchild of Tony Särkkä (R.I.P.), better known as IT from Abruptum. Ophthalamia is both the name of the band and of the fictional world its lyrics are set in.
It is not exaggerated to say that Ophthalamia was Tony “IT” Särkkä’s grand metaphysical creation — a dreamlike realm ruled by Elishia, goddess of night and desire, where death, sorrow, and rebellion against divine light form the path to transcendence. The band fused black metal not only with mythic storytelling but also with dark esotericism. Musically, this vision was carried by a unique blend of blackened traditional heavy metal, somewhere between Dissection’s cold melodicism, Dan Swanö’s proggy style, and the doom-laden weight of Black Sabbath.
Sadly, this band remains deeply overlooked and underrated. I can only urge anyone intrigued by unconventional black metal to explore their three albums — works that feature an impressive cast of musicians, including Jon and Emil Nödtveidt, Legion, Benny Larsson, Dan Swanö, and Peter Tägtgren. This one is truly unique within the 90s Swedish metal scene, predating even more widely known acts like Opeth.
Just around the corner, the ’90s unleashed a flood of new black metal bands. Amid this flourishing scene, some artists went even further, creating elaborate fictional worlds and mythologies to frame their music. Perhaps the finest example of this approach in the mid-to-late ’90s was the UK’s Bal-Sagoth.
As with the band’s name itself, Bal-Sagoth’s lore is heavily inspired by the pulp stories of Robert E. Howard — the creator of Conan the Barbarian and a close friend of H. P. Lovecraft. Their fictional realm, known as The Ancient World, shares many traits with Howard’s settings, featuring regions such as Atlantis, Hyperborea, and the Imperium that dominate its mythic world map. The narratives center around a Conan-like hero named Caylen-Tor, and Byron Roberts has devoted so much effort to developing this saga — far more than to the music in recent decades — that he has even published stories in DRM Books’ Sword & Sorcery magazines.
Even though Bal-Sagoth’s musical output nearly vanished after their last LP in 2006, I still recommend the band not only because they’re one of the most lore-rich acts in all of black metal, but also for their unique approach to composition. Their debut album, A Black Moon Broods over Lemuria, blends the symphonic black metal sound of early Cradle of Filth (Principle of Evil album) with elements of power metal, epic heavy metal, and death metal. Their songs are highly narrative, structured in distinct sections that alternate between harsh vocals and spoken-word passages to advance the story. The result is a truly singular sound — and as their discography progressed, the power metal elements took on a more prominent role.
Hardly any other band has a sound quite like this (with the exceptions of Kull and Zel Agganor), so you won’t regret checking them out.
Now, to get to what I promised at the beginning of this article… Which band was the first in black metal to create a fully realized fictional world intended to span multiple songs or albums? As if it weren’t enough credit to be one of the inventors of Norwegian black metal riffing (alongside Euronymous), the first person to do this was none other than Snorre Ruch, a.k.a. Blackthorn. "Holy sh.., and what was that world called?" Drum roll… Grymirk.
“What?!” you might ask. Yes, you read that right — as in Thorns’ legendary Grymyrk 1991 demo. That cursed tape that inspired — and infected — the entire Helvete scene with his dissonant riffing style.
In Snorre's own words in an interview in Black Metal: Evolution of the Cult:
"The recording was named the Grymyrk tape, “Grymyrk” being, as Snorre explained in a later webzine interview, “the grim world which all music and lyrics for the early material came from… a dead and silent world with its own strange logic. We even made a language for it… A thirty-word dictionary.”"
Well, there you have it — straight from Snorre’s own words. And now that I think about it, doesn’t the grim world of Blashyrkh sound suspiciously like Grymirk? And wasn’t it, in a way, an actual Freezing Moon? There’s a lot of Thorns and Mayhem influence hiding in plain sight there — the Grymyrk tape and Mayhem's DMDS live songs predates everything Immortal ever did — even if Demonaz insists otherwise, sticking to the usual black metal trope of being “second to none” — claiming he was inspired only by the forest behind his house and a steady diet of Bathory.
Anyway… let’s raise one more cheer for old Snorre — the man with the uncanny power to reshape black metal history multiple times, often without being noticed, or even noticing it himself.
One could also credit Mayhem’s Dead as a precursor to this trend. Though he didn’t invent a fictional world of his own, his interviews reveal that he drew inspiration from a dark, idealized vision of Transylvania to craft several of his lyrics, giving them a distinct atmospheric depth. And, in yet another unintended twist of fate, it shouldn’t be overlooked that Snorre — alongside Attila — became Dead’s successor in bringing De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas to completion, being tasked by Euronymous with assembling and finishing the lyrics from Dead’s scraps and notes as raw material.
From Blashyrkh to Ophthalamia, from The Ancient World to Grymirk, these realms show that black metal has always been more than just sound — it’s mythmaking. Each of these bands turned imagination into geography, carving their obsessions into worlds of ice, fire, and shadow. Whether born from escapism, artistic vision, or sheer madness, these invented lands reveal something essential about black metal itself: a genre forever haunted by the need to forge its own cosmos against the symbolic void of the modern, mundane world.