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What is blackgaze? The albums that define it
Black metal's shrieks meet shoegaze's bliss: eight records that built the bridge.
Blackgaze is the fusion genre combining black metal's tremolo riffs and shrieked vocals with shoegaze's blurred, euphoric guitar textures. Pioneered by France's Alcest in the late 2000s and pushed mainstream by Deafheaven's Sunbather (2013), it remains metal's most contested (and most beautiful) border zone. These eight albums define it.
When Deafheaven put pink on a metal album cover in 2013, the argument got loud, but the music had been coming for years. Alcest's Neige had already spent a decade folding black metal's blast and scream into something closer to rapture, and a quiet network of bands across France, Germany and the Netherlands was doing the same math.
Blackgaze enrages purists on both sides, which is usually the sign of a genre worth hearing. These eight records make the case.
- 1
Souvenirs d'un autre monde
★ 4.5 · 3The founding text. Neige built Souvenirs d'un autre monde (2007) around childhood visions of another world, black metal instrumentation playing major-key bliss. The record that proved the scream and the shimmer belonged together.
- 2
Sunbather
★ 4.1 · 9The genre's crossover bomb: pink cover, ecstatic ten-minute songs, the best-reviewed album of 2013 on Metacritic. George Clarke shrieking over music this triumphant rewired what metal was allowed to feel like, and made blackgaze a household word, at least in arguing households.
- 3
- 4
- 5
Septembre et ses dernières pensées
★ 4.2 · 3The painterly wing: Fursy Teyssier's 2010 debut drifts closer to dream pop than metal, all autumn light and animated-film sensibility. The proof that the scene was always as much about French atmosphere as Norwegian fury.
- 6
Lost
An Autumn for Crippled Children
Be the first to rateThe Dutch trio's raw, synth-smeared take: Lost (2010) buries unbearably sad melodies in distortion that sounds like weather. Fifteen-plus albums on, they remain the genre's most reliable heartbreak machine.
- 7
- 8
Anomie
★ 3.5 · 1One-man project from Baku, Azerbaijan: Anomie (2017) folds post-rock euphoria and electronic pulse into the formula. Blackgaze as borderless internet music, which, by 2017, is exactly what the genre had become.
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