Like many bad teenage ideas, it began with a friend I admired a little too much. He was my best friend – he seemed sure of himself and possessed that type of musical taste that made everything else feel cringe. He moved from genre to genre with a sense of purpose. I, meanwhile, merely followed – diligently, even devoutly. When he discovered black metal, I followed him there too.
Soon, my bedroom began to resemble a mausoleum: there were band posters featuring men made up to look like corpses glowering into Nordic fog, and CDs with tracklists that looked more like incantations than music. I began dressing the part – black on black on black. I scoured forums for rare pressings and live bootlegs. And yet, I didn’t really know what I was listening to.
The music itself was hypnotic: raw, relentless, thick with atmosphere. It sounded like alienation and angst and misanthropy – which, to a teenager, was more or less the point. It gave form to rebellion. But I didn’t take a look behind the scenes. I just savoured the vibes.
At a certain point, my friend told me that Varg Vikernes, the man behind the Norwegian music project Burzum, had killed his bandmate and served time for murder. “Erm, what are we supposed to do with that?” we wondered. We shrugged and said we’d shun his music and focus on others’ instead. Cool.
Then my cousin called. He’s 11 years older than me – he taught me how to play chess when I was a child, picked books for me to read, was generally level-headed. I’d mentioned some of the bands I was into during a visit. He’d done what I hadn’t: looked them up. Translated lyrics. Read interviews. Traced connections. What he found made my stomach turn.
A number of these bands, it turned out, weren’t just provocateurs with a flair for the macabre. They trafficked in something darker: coded fascist imagery, explicit Nazi sympathies, antisemitic allusions. Some had links to actual hate groups. Others sang odes to racial purity in archaic languages or quoted far-right ideologues beneath layers of rune fonts. Graveland and Nokturnal Mortum – bands I had once prized for their “atmosphere” – were now impossible to listen to in the same way. Graveland’s founder Rob Darken often expressed white nationalist views and aligned himself with pagan fascist ideas. At the beginning of their career, Nokturnal Mortum had strong ties to the Nationalist Socialist Black Metal (NSBM) scene; band members gave interviews endorsing neo-Nazi ideologies. What we’d thought was merely transgressive turned out, in some cases, to be ideologically clear – and its ideology was ethno-nationalism, fascism and white supremacy.
My cousin didn’t lecture me. He didn’t make me feel small. He just said: “You’re smart. But don’t let your intelligence make you careless.”
That sentence shifted something. Because he was right – I hadn’t been careless by accident. I’d made myself un-curious. I didn’t want to know what the lyrics said and what the bands represented because knowing might have ruined the world I’d built. Back then, I thought I was choosing the music. But in truth, I was choosing to belong to something.
After that conversation, I began to step back. And interestingly, so did my friend. The more we read – the more we realised that the fringe aesthetics were, in some cases, a smokescreen for deeply held hatred – the harder it became to hear the music without flinching. The image we’d constructed, of misanthropic musicians howling into cold landscapes, collapsed. What was left was more troubling: a subculture in which some members wore ideology as easily as face paint. The aesthetic wasn’t just surface; it was camouflage.
We both stopped listening – not all at once, but steadily. I boxed up the CDs. We unfollowed the forums. Eventually, the friend and I drifted apart, though not because of the music, not directly. Life intervened.
And here’s what I still wonder: if my cousin hadn’t said anything, would I have noticed? Would I have cared? Would I have ended up defending ideas I didn’t believe in simply because they came wrapped in sounds I loved?
We like to imagine that we are the authors of our convictions – that ideology arrives through argument and reason. But often it slips in sideways, piggybacking on aesthetics, community, taste. When you’re young, especially, belonging can matter more than belief. You pick up codes and allegiances without even noticing. You mouth things before you mean them. And the more you repeat them, the more you become them.
What saved me wasn’t my own moral clarity, but a quiet act of attention. Someone I trusted took the time to investigate what I hadn’t, and offered that knowledge without condescension. It didn’t feel like a confrontation. It felt like being gently turned back toward myself.
I still listen to loud music. Techno, for instance. But if the music has lyrics, I listen to them. I ask more questions. I know how easy it is to be seduced by the feeling of depth without understanding what lies at the bottom.
Ana Schnabl is a Slovenian novelist, editor and critic
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