Michael Moynihan & Didrik Søderlind (1998) – Book Review

Authors: Michael Moynihan & Didrik Søderlind
Published: 1998
Genre: Music History / Black Metal / True Crime / Extreme Metal
Riff Report Rating: 🎸🎸🎸½ – 3.5/5

Some music books tell you how an album was recorded.

Some tell you what happened on tour.

And then there’s Lords of Chaos, a book where the music becomes entangled with church burnings, murder, suicide, ideology, media hysteria and one of the darkest chapters in the history of heavy metal.

This is not your standard rock ’n’ roll memoir.

There are no amusing stories about somebody accidentally trashing the wrong hotel room.

No drummer waking up in a swimming pool.

No guitarist losing a Les Paul at Heathrow.

This is considerably darker territory.

Published in 1998, Lords of Chaos: The Bloody Rise of the Satanic Metal Underground, by Michael Moynihan and Didrik Søderlind, became one of the best-known books documenting the rise of Norwegian black metal and the violent events surrounding parts of that scene during the early 1990s.

It’s fascinating.

It’s disturbing.

It’s influential.

And it’s also controversial as hell.

So paint your face, turn the lights down and stick on something suitably frostbitten.

We’re heading into the Norwegian darkness. ❄️🔥🤘

🇳🇴 BEFORE THE CHAOS

To understand why Norwegian black metal became so infamous, you’ve got to understand what the scene was reacting against.

By the late 1980s and early 1990s, heavy metal had become enormous.

Metallica were heading towards stadium domination.

Hair metal ruled MTV.

Heavy music was increasingly professional, commercial and polished.

Then, far away from Hollywood and its hairspray factories, a group of young Norwegian musicians effectively decided:

“Nah. Make it colder.”

😂❄️

They wanted something raw.

Primitive.

Hostile.

Underground.

Black metal became intentionally inaccessible.

The production could sound harsh.

The vocals became shrieks.

Guitars created walls of tremolo-picked sound.

Drums became frantic.

The imagery embraced darkness, death, anti-Christian themes and the grotesque.

The objective wasn’t mainstream acceptance.

The objective was rejection.

🤘 BEFORE NORWAY: THE FIRST WAVE

The book doesn’t treat Norwegian black metal as something appearing magically from a frozen forest.

Earlier bands helped establish the vocabulary.

Venom provided the genre with its name through their 1982 album Black Metal.

Bathory became enormously influential.

Celtic Frost, Hellhammer, Mercyful Fate and other extreme-metal pioneers pushed darkness and aggression further.

But Norway would take those ingredients and create something culturally explosive.

Because eventually the image stopped being just an image.

💀 MAYHEM

At the centre of much of Lords of Chaos is Mayhem.

Few bands in metal history have accumulated such a disturbing mythology.

Formed in Norway during the 1980s, Mayhem became foundational to the emerging black-metal scene.

The band’s guitarist Øystein “Euronymous” Aarseth became one of its central figures.

But Mayhem’s history would become inseparable from tragedy.

Especially after the arrival of Swedish vocalist Per Yngve “Dead” Ohlin.

And yes.

Even by black-metal standards, calling yourself Dead should probably have been an indication that things were heading somewhere bleak.

🖤 DEAD

Dead became famous for taking black metal’s obsession with death to deeply unsettling extremes.

His stage persona wasn’t simply theatrical.

He reportedly became preoccupied with death and decay, and his performances could involve extreme self-harm.

This wasn’t Alice Cooper getting guillotined onstage and then going for dinner afterwards.

The boundary between performance and genuine psychological distress had become frighteningly thin.

In 1991, Dead died by suicide.

He was only 22.

The aftermath became one of the most notorious episodes in extreme-metal history, particularly because of Euronymous’s actions following the discovery of his body.

We don’t need to sensationalise the details here.

The facts are grim enough.

And this is where the story begins crossing a line.

Black metal wasn’t merely cultivating dangerous imagery anymore.

Real people were dying.

🔥 HELVETE AND THE BLACK CIRCLE

Euronymous later opened a record shop in Oslo called Helvete.

The name translates roughly as Hell.

Subtle.

😂🔥

The shop became an important meeting place for musicians and fans associated with the emerging Norwegian black-metal scene.

Around this environment developed what became popularly described as the “Black Circle.”

Exactly how organised or formal this supposed group really was has been debated considerably.

And that’s important when reading Lords of Chaos.

Because black-metal history is full of stories repeated so often that mythology and reality have become welded together.

People wanted the scene to appear terrifying.

Musicians encouraged that image.

Journalists amplified it.

Police investigated it.

Fans repeated it.

Eventually separating performance from reality became extraordinarily difficult.

🔥 THE CHURCH BURNINGS

Then Norway started losing churches.

During the early 1990s, a series of church arsons became associated with figures connected to the black-metal scene.

One of the most famous cases involved Fantoft Stave Church, which was destroyed by fire in 1992.

The attacks attracted enormous media attention.

Suddenly Norwegian black metal wasn’t simply an underground musical movement.

It was international news.

And once newspapers discovered stories involving:

Satanism!

Heavy metal!

Burning churches!

Murder!

Well…

Good luck getting nuance back into the conversation after that.

The entire scene became wrapped in fear, mythology and sensationalism.

🎸 BURZUM AND VARG VIKERNES

Another central figure in the book is Varg Vikernes, the musician behind Burzum.

Vikernes became one of the most notorious figures connected with Norwegian black metal.

His story intersects with the church arsons, ideological extremism and ultimately the killing of Euronymous.

It’s important not to romanticise this material.

The mythology surrounding extreme music can sometimes turn criminals into antiheroes.

But murder isn’t rock ’n’ roll rebellion.

Arson isn’t an edgy stage prop.

Extremist ideology isn’t a cool band aesthetic.

Real people and communities suffer consequences.

That distinction matters.

🩸 THE MURDER OF EURONYMOUS

In August 1993, the conflict between Vikernes and Euronymous reached its horrifying conclusion.

Vikernes killed Euronymous.

He was later convicted of the murder as well as church arsons and other offences.

Euronymous was 25.

Whatever mythology had surrounded the Norwegian black-metal scene, there was now no pretending this was simply theatrical rebellion.

Someone was dead.

Another central figure in the scene was going to prison.

And black metal’s reputation would forever be connected to the violence.

🎶 BUT WHAT ABOUT THE BLOODY MUSIC?

This is where things become frustrating.

Because Norwegian black metal produced genuinely influential music.

Mayhem.

Darkthrone.

Emperor.

Immortal.

Burzum.

And others.

The scene developed an aesthetic and sound that influenced extreme metal worldwide.

The deliberately raw production became part of the identity.

The guitar sound was often thin, cold and abrasive rather than conventionally heavy.

Vocals sounded inhuman.

Atmosphere mattered enormously.

The music could evoke isolation, winter, forests, darkness and hostility.

You didn’t listen to early Norwegian black metal because you wanted something cheerful while doing the washing-up.

Unless you’ve got very intense washing-up habits, obviously.

😂🤘

❄️ THE SOUND OF COLD

One thing Lords of Chaos helps communicate is how black metal became more than simply another heavy-metal subgenre.

It developed an entire aesthetic.

Corpse paint.

Black-and-white photography.

Illegible logos.

Forests.

Snow.

Medieval imagery.

Death.

Anti-commercial attitudes.

It looked like someone had locked a group of metalheads in a Norwegian forest with one photocopier and absolutely no sunlight.

And somehow…

it worked.

Black metal became instantly recognisable.

Even people who couldn’t name a Darkthrone song could recognise the visual language.

That’s cultural impact.

📰 WHEN THE MEDIA FOUND BLACK METAL

The Norwegian press became fascinated with the scene.

And members of the scene sometimes seemed equally fascinated with terrifying journalists.

That’s where things get interesting.

Because the media coverage helped transform a tiny underground movement into an international phenomenon.

The musicians wanted notoriety.

The newspapers wanted shocking stories.

Everyone fed everyone else.

And Lords of Chaos itself eventually became part of that same mythology.

The book didn’t merely document how black metal was perceived.

It helped shape how generations of readers understood it.

⚠️ AND THAT’S WHERE THE PROBLEMS BEGIN

Here’s why we’re not handing out five guitars.

Lords of Chaos is controversial.

Very controversial.

Its framing, source choices, treatment of ideology and emphasis on sensational events have all attracted criticism.

Some musicians associated with the scene have rejected or criticised aspects of the book.

And there are legitimate questions about whether focusing so heavily on criminality and extremist personalities distorts the wider history of black metal.

That’s the problem.

If someone reads only Lords of Chaos, they could easily leave believing Norwegian black metal was essentially:

Mayhem + Varg + churches + murder.

It wasn’t.

There were far more musicians.

More records.

More scenes.

More artistic motivations.

More complicated cultural factors.

The crime story is undeniably part of the history.

It isn’t the entire history.

🧠 THE EXTREMISM PROBLEM

Another difficult element is the book’s treatment of extremist political ideas.

Some individuals connected to parts of the scene expressed racist, nationalist, far-right or other extremist beliefs.

Those ideas need historical examination.

But there’s always a danger when documenting extremism:

explanation can accidentally become amplification.

A writer needs to contextualise ideology without turning its proponents into mysterious forbidden intellectuals.

That’s a difficult balance.

And readers should approach these sections critically rather than accepting every ideological claim at face value.

There’s nothing particularly rebellious about replacing one form of authoritarian nonsense with another.

🤔 TRUE CRIME OR MUSIC HISTORY?

This might be the biggest question surrounding Lords of Chaos.

What exactly is it?

A black-metal history?

A true-crime book?

A study of extremism?

A cultural history?

The answer is:

A bit of all of them.

Sometimes brilliantly.

Sometimes awkwardly.

Readers primarily interested in the music may occasionally become frustrated because the criminal mythology dominates so much of the narrative.

But that’s also why the book became so famous.

Let’s be realistic.

A title like:

An Extremely Detailed Examination of Early Norwegian Black Metal Production Techniques

probably wasn’t getting adapted into a film.

😂

🎬 THE LORDS OF CHAOS FILM

The book later inspired the 2018 film Lords of Chaos, directed by Jonas Åkerlund.

The movie introduced the story to an even broader audience and inevitably reignited arguments about accuracy, portrayal and whether these events should be dramatised at all.

As with the book, it’s important to remember:

dramatisation isn’t documentation.

Films compress.

Characters get simplified.

Timelines get adjusted.

Reality gets shaped into narrative.

So if the film sent you searching for the real history?

Good.

Just don’t stop with one source.

📚 READING LORDS OF CHAOS TODAY

Reading the book decades after the events is a very different experience.

The Norwegian black-metal scene has now been analysed extensively.

Musicians have given further interviews.

Other books have appeared.

Documentaries have examined the period.

The genre itself has evolved dramatically.

That means modern readers have something audiences in 1998 didn’t necessarily possess:

more perspectives.

And that’s how we’d recommend approaching Lords of Chaos.

Read it.

Absolutely.

But don’t treat it as the definitive final word on black metal.

Use it as one major document within a much larger history.

🤘 WHY IT REMAINS ESSENTIAL

For all its problems, there’s no denying the book’s importance.

Lords of Chaos became perhaps the most internationally famous book associated with black metal.

It introduced countless readers to names, bands and events they’d never previously encountered.

It documented an extraordinary period when an obscure underground music scene became connected with genuine violence and international controversy.

And as a reading experience?

Bloody hell.

It’s difficult to put down.

You keep thinking:

“Surely this can’t get darker.”

Then you turn the page.

It does.

🖤 DON’T LET THE CRIMES ERASE THE MUSIC

This is perhaps our biggest takeaway.

Black metal shouldn’t be reduced solely to its most notorious criminals.

Because beyond the headlines was an artistic movement.

Musicians were experimenting with atmosphere.

Production.

Identity.

Mythology.

Nature.

Minimalism.

Extremity.

Some created extraordinary records.

Others created absolute rubbish recorded through what sounded like a broken toaster in a shed.

But hey…

that’s underground music for you.

😂🔥

The influence spread far beyond Norway.

Black metal developed across Europe and eventually around the world.

Today it encompasses countless styles, philosophies and approaches.

The early Norwegian scene was hugely important.

But it wasn’t the beginning and certainly wasn’t the end.

🎸 THE RIFF REPORT VERDICT

Lords of Chaos is fascinating, disturbing and historically important — but deeply complicated.

As a page-turner?

Excellent.

As an introduction to the notorious events surrounding early Norwegian black metal?

Extremely effective.

As the definitive history of black metal?

No.

And that’s why we’re settling at:

⭐ RIFF REPORT RATING: 🎸🎸🎸½ – 3.5/5

It’s a book worth reading precisely because it became so influential.

But read it critically.

Question the framing.

Remember that recollections from highly controversial participants aren’t automatically reliable simply because they’re printed on a page.

Seek out other perspectives.

And above all, don’t allow sensational stories about crime to erase the musicians and music that existed outside them.

Because there’s a danger with stories like this.

Eventually the mythology becomes more famous than the records.

And when that happens, murderers become celebrities while musicians become footnotes.

That’s arse backwards.

Black metal’s history deserves better.

So read Lords of Chaos.

Be fascinated by it.

Be disturbed by it.

Argue with it.

Then stick on the records and keep digging.

Because underneath decades of headlines, corpse paint, burning churches and mythology sits the thing that started this whole bloody story:

Music.

Cold.

Hostile.

Uncompromising.

And influential as hell.

Stay loud. Stay curious. And maybe leave the churches alone, yeah? 🤘❄️🔥

💬 OVER TO YOU, RIFFERS!

Have you read Lords of Chaos?

Do you consider it essential black-metal history, sensationalised true crime, or an uncomfortable mixture of both?

And which early black-metal record would you recommend to someone exploring the genre for the first time?

Get stuck into the comments, mun. 👇🤘

Proudly Welsh. Proudly Loud. 🐉🤘

The Riff Report Blog
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