The world needs yet another book about black metal as much as Varg Vikernes needs to buy another gunrack, right? Well, Dayal Patterson doesn’t agree (about the book part, at any rate). A regular writer and photographer to Metal Hammer (as well as an occasional contributor to Record Collector and The Quietus), Dayal has penned Black Metal: Evolution Of The Cult, a mammoth 600+ page book on “the progress of the genre, from its infancy in the early eighties through to its resurrection in the nineties and onwards to the fascinating scene we see today” (cheers, for that, PR blurb). Blimey.

With all that in mind, we gave Dayal a buzz to ask him our usual mix of awkward, annoying, and ever-so-slightly insightful questions about his book, the musicians he interviewed in order to write it, and just why British black metal bands look so silly in corpse paint.

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We’ve got a fairly loose system when it comes to organising submissions from our contributors. They email us an idea, we tell them if it’s good or rubbish, then they go off and write it. Nice and simple. So when Tom Dare emailed us with a pitch for a retrospective on how Black Metal has evolved in the twenty years since the release of Darkthrone’s A Blaze In The Northern Sky, we just let him get on with it.

We just didn’t reckon he’s write quite so bloody much.

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There can’t be many albums that get metal fans’ collective excitement up as much as Slayer’s Reign In Blood does, which is why it seemed like everyone with even the slightest metal tinge to their record collection in the South of England decamped to North London last week to catch Slayer perform arguably their best (and certainly most important) album in full at All Tomorrow’s Parties’ I’ll Be Your Mirror festival at Alexandra Palace. Gary Wolstenholme doesn’t even live in the South, but he still made the trek down from his native Sheffield to take photos of it for us.

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All this week, Tom Dare has been guiding you through how Black Metal has evolved over the course of the last two decades (check out parts one, two, three and four if you haven’t already). Now, as the week draws to a close, we’ve asked Tom to put together the songs that have made it happen into a Spotify Slaylist, and in doing to to lovingly cobble them together in an order that somehow tries to make sense of the wildly differing styles that constitute the genre these days. Wish him luck….

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In the final part of his look at the Black Metal evolution over the past 20 years, today Tom Dare is examining the murkier and more indistinct realms of “post”-Black Metal band, as well as those bands who might’ve moved beyond the boundaries of Black Metal musically, still remain within the genre in spirit, at least….

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In this second part of his four-part feature into Black Metal’s sonic evolution over the last two decades, Tom Dare is setting his sights on two aspects of the genre’s evolution that almost seem to run counter to the musical tenets of its early years. Today he’s looking at how Black Metal has come to embrace both its proggier and more ambient sides….

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Eco-spiritualist black metallers, Wolves In The Throne Room, released an EP last year about a bucket of oats and barley plotting to take over the world. That was reason enough for Tom Gibbons to interrogate Aaron Weaver, drummer with the Washington State-based band, after their recent London show.

How was London this time around?
“I was really pleased with that show. The last time we played London it was a bit more stressful for us – we had played Munich the night before and then we had to get up and get to London  and we got lost. We got left at the airport and no one came to pick us up. We somehow managed to get all our gear into a cab and we just made the show. It was a good performance but we were barely hanging on. More recently at the Underworld I was really pleased. There was a really good turnout.”

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