5 Metal Bands Actually As Scary As Your Mom Thinks They Are
For most moms, metal music, especially the more brutal subgenres, are well and truly the work of the devil.
Even among non-parents, there’s plenty of people who will scrunch up their nose and mentally eighty-six your aux privileges the first time you throw on some Cattle Decapitation — a band that happens to be a pretty good picture of the difference between metal’s image and reality, being that they’re a terrifying-looking group of strict vegetarians. Metal enjoyers like myself know that actual metalheads tend to be teddy bears in battle jackets, and the dark magic they’re most likely to practice comes out of the D&D Players’ Handbook.
But there are still a couple bands that, through real-life actions far removed from a stage show, have indicated that they might have been serious about that whole death thing. So much so that even their fans might find it a little tough to absentmindedly throw on their merch. Something that’s also popped up occasionally as metal shirts became fashionable, with clueless celebs rocking Burzum shirts and not understanding why they're getting side-eye.
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Speaking of Burzum, so as to not give them breath, I’ll avoid the highly unpleasant dark corners of Nazi metal, but again: If you’re going to wear a metal shirt for the graphics, at least google the band, twice if there’s a big eagle or Nordic runes on it.
Along those lines, here are five metal bands that are more fucked-up than even their album covers suggest…
Goatlord
Goatlord was a death metal band from Las Vegas that was active from 1985 to 1997. The cause was the usual “tensions between band members,” but based on the actions of guitarist Joe Frankulin after the band’s dissolution, this probably was over some darker stuff than practice scheduling. In 2008, he created a now defunct shock site named Bloodshows, along the lines of other internet gore and shock depositories like Rotten dot com. The site shut down in 2013, but the problems that led him to create it clearly ran deeper, and ended in tragedy, when Frankulin committed a horrific murder-suicide in 2015.
Dissection
At least going by the cover art of the album above, Dissection seems like it would land more on the cheesy, power metal side of things. Fantasy elements aside, they were indeed fully in the realm of Swedish black metal. They were active from 1989 to 1997, when they were obviously unable to continue due to the imprisonment of vocalist and guitarist Jon Nodtveidt. Imprisonment for the murder of a man named Josef ben Meddour. It was charged as a homophobic hate crime, with the victim being a gay man.
A motive that was made slightly uncertain because before the murder, Nodtveidt and his accomplice had discussed human sacrifice with members of the small but actual, honest-to-god Satanic cult that his accomplice “Vlad” had founded, the Misanthropic Luciferian Order. Nodtveidt was released in 2004 (thank you Swedish justice system!) and briefly reformed Dissection, though, credit to them, with none of the other original members. He committed suicide in 2006 surrounded by lit candles and the Liber Azerate, the satanic book of choice of the Misanthropic Luciferian Order.
Emperor
We go further into the Swedish black metal scene, as any metalhead entering this probably assumed we would. For Emperor, it was their drummer, Bard “Faust” Eithun, who would end up committing a murder of his own. Like Nodtveidt, he too was responsible for the murder of a gay man, Magne Andreassen, in Lillehammer Park in 1992. Unlike Nodtveidt, he specifically disavowed both Satanism and fascistic connections, claiming the murder was committed purely out of impulse.
He confessed this to friends after burning down Holmenkollen Church, which was a preferred criminal activity of Swedish black metal bands at the time (Emperor’s guitarist Samoth would later also serve a prison sentence for church arson). Whatever the motivation, it was brutal, with the man stabbed 37 times along with blunt trauma to the head. Eithun was released in 2003 (once again, thank you Sweden!), and a year later, he was invited to join the newly reformed Dissection.
Mayhem
The most obvious inclusion on this list, and probably the most likely band for even non-metalheads to have heard whispers of, a grisly reputation that’s more than well deserved. Pretty much every detail surrounding Mayhem sounds like rumors made up to pass around a record store, but almost all of them are true. For most bands, even in metal, things like a singer cutting themselves with broken glass onstage, or live shows featuring impaled livestock heads, would be enough to be forever labeled fully fucked-up. They were also the band most directly linked to repeated church arsons. One member, Varg Vikernes, who would later form Burzum, has a long individual rap sheet of horrific behavior, but one I won’t go into because he’s a fascist neo-Nazi shithead.
The reason these all fade into footnotes, though, is because of the single shocking series of events that Mayhem is best known for, which start with the suicide of singer Per “Dead” Ohlin. He had killed himself with a shotgun, and left a suicide note that began with the words, “Excuse all the blood.” This was discovered by his bandmate Oystein “Euronymous” Aarseth, who reacted by going to buy a disposable camera, rearranging the scene and taking a photograph that he would use as the cover art (uncensored, of course) of their album Dawn of the Black Hearts.
I’m not going to hotlink it, but it’s very much available online if your curiosity so demands. He then gathered fragments of Dead’s skull and made a necklace with them. As for the rest, he gifted pieces of the skull to other musicians in the scene that he considered deserving. Euronymous himself would shortly afterwards be murdered by Vikernes, but only because the other member, a man who went by Necrobutcher, didn't get to him first.
Ghost
Zoinks, Scoob! He looks like the Pope but he’s d-d-d-DEAD!
