Hey fellow lemmings, I’ve recently watched some documentries and read some articles that made me more aware of the existence of NSBM. I love metal, both the music and the culture but I don’t want to hear anything related to that specific scene.
I don’t want to dicuss the morality of the subject, I just wish to know how I can easily identify if a band I’m listening to is problematic.
I’m aware of Metallum, but that is not always reliable and easily accessible. I am also not able to detect the themes in the lyrics, tbh most of the time I can barely even understand what the vocalist is saying. Thank you all in advance
One way is search for ‘band name + controversy’ or ‘band name + nazi’ or something similar. It becomes second nature after awhile.
Conversely, seek out non-problematic black metal - antifascist black metal is a thing.
Yeah but that only works for bands that are popular enough that someone wrote an article about.
That sounds more to my taste haha, do you have any recommendations?
Loads :) some of these are not explicitly anti-fascist but they’re non problematic.
- Panopticon
- Wolves In The Throne Room
- Blackbraid
- Dawn Ray’d
- Iskra
- The Infernal Sea
- Azel’s Mountain
- Mizmor
- Gaerea
- Nahasheol
- Auld
There’s also the Anti Fascist Black Metal YouTube channel which showcases antifa black (and other) metal - gets lots of new releases.
Kind of biased, but whatever. Seems like the writer basically equates anything not leftist to be essentially nazi.
Yeah, fair enough, it’s a decent enough starting point though IMO, obviously use your own judgement.
Not so sure - all they do is list explicitly leftist/anarchist bands and explicitly fash/nazi bands. Everyone in between should be considered safe (or maybe unknown). For example, Behemoth aren’t on either list, nor are Darkthrone or Rotting Christ or a shit load of other bands, therefore they must be OK.
Although I doubt this method will work today but what I used to do was google the band and wait until I found a link discussing the band on Stormfront, an old neo-Nazi forum. It was huge (by extremist standards) in the 2000s but it’s barely active these days.
Sadly these groups have been around pretty much since black metal started. I usually just try to look up the bands bio. If they’re on Wikipedia it will usually say something about it. The lists others posted seem pretty helpful too
