A few weeks before the pioneering Norwegian black metal band Mayhem set off for a North American tour celebrating its 40th anniversary, the frontman Attila Csihar sounded contemplative.
“The band has, of course, a long history, and lots of things happened,” he said in a video chat from his home in Budapest last October, wearing a necklace of skulls from a Kali temple in India.
As if to prove the point, Csihar, 53, soon underwent emergency surgery, and the tour was canceled. (“Death is the ultimate glorious crown of life, now he understands it even more,” he wrote in a Facebook post.)
Now Mayhem is back on the road (with a New York stop on Monday) to finally deliver its anniversary blowout, this time as the headliner of the Decibel Magazine Tour.
Still, this was all a mere hiccup compared to the group’s extraordinary travails. For fans of extreme music, Mayhem released black metal’s defining album, “De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas,” in 1994. Everybody else might just vaguely remember lurid early ’90s tabloid headlines.
The band, created by a bunch of teenagers in 1984, was starting to make wavelets in its tiny musical niche when its first singer, Per Ohlin (nom de metal: Dead), died by suicide in 1991, at age 22. The first person to turn up at the scene was the guitarist Oystein Aarseth, a.k.a. Euronymous, who posed Dead’s body to snap more dramatic photos. Two years later, Euronymous was murdered by a one-time bandmate, Varg Vikernes. He was 25.
“It was bad karma, you could say,” the bassist and founding member Necrobutcher (real name: Jorn Stubberud), 56, dryly commented in a video interview from his home in Oslo.
If this weren’t enough, musicians linked to the band, including Vikernes, had been busy burning down historic churches. All these events were documented in a book, “Lords of Chaos: The Bloody Rise of the Satanic Metal Underground,” which was adapted into a feature film in 2019.
“For a long time it overshadowed everything,” Necrobutcher said of the turmoil. “It was overwhelming for us on a personal level, but it was also overwhelming for the music — the press couldn’t stop talking about it.”
Fast-forward three decades and the once-scrappy combo has shown startling artistic longevity and influence. In 2016, Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth published Necrobutcher’s documentary book, “The Death Archives: Mayhem 1984-94” via his Ecstatic Peace Library imprint, and wrote the afterword. In 2021, Mayhem won a honorary award at the Spellemanprisen, Norway’s answer to the Grammys.
Dramatic stories are not rare in rock — have you ever perused the Allman Brothers Band’s Wikipedia page? But with Mayhem, the band’s extracurricular activities were very much aligned with its art. Onstage, Dead favored blood, self-mutilation and the black-and-white makeup known as corpse paint. The songs molded a claustrophobic, atmospheric universe out of blast beats, buzz-saw guitars and strangled shrieking, with misanthropic lyrics that explored bleakness, despair, paganism and coldness (both metaphorical and literal).
Growing up, Euronymous and Necrobutcher listened to heavy bands like Venom (which released an album titled “Black Metal” in 1982), Black Sabbath, Motörhead, Bathory and Celtic Frost. Their own combo, which the virtuoso drummer Hellhammer (Jan Axel Blomberg) joined in 1988, also incorporated the teens’ love for splatter movies and what Necrobutcher called “dark, depressive art, like good old Edvard Munch.”
But they wanted more: something to rebel against, and a hook that would make them stand out. “We found the Christianity,” Necrobutcher said. “We saw the hypocrisy.
“It was also on an intellectual level,” he added. “Wouldn’t we be smart enough to be let out on our own without being guided by religion? The more we did poke, the more attention we got for just pointing out that religion and state together is wrong.”
The band’s guitarist was its engine and mastermind in those early years.
“Euronymous was the great self-promoter, and certainly whoever you might assign musical ideas to,” said the writer John Wray, whose 2023 novel “Gone to the Wolves” focuses on young Floridians who become involved in the Norwegian black metal scene. “He was absolutely the person who created the mystique of Mayhem and the sort of infamy, very knowingly, very intentionally.”
Euronymous also understood the importance of networking. When Mayhem needed a new singer after Dead’s suicide, he contacted Csihar, from the Budapest band Tormentor. “He was very polite, with a typewriter letter, pretty sophisticated, and very detailed,” Csihar recalled.
Csihar sang on the sessions for what would become “De Mysteriis,” hustled back to Hungary, then returned to the Mayhem fold in 2004. The amiable singer has long been interested in the occult, and his interests have only widened in the past decades — he discoursed at length about meditation, ancient Egypt and a project in which he vocalizes over the silent movie “Nosferatu.” His passion for experimental music may have made him a left-field choice in the early 1990s, but it was very much of a piece with the ethos Euronymous imparted on the band.
“He was always preaching a very open-minded approach to music,” Dayal Patterson, who wrote the book “Black Metal: Evolution of the Cult,” said in a video conversation from Britain.
“Something that people that aren’t into black metal don’t understand is that it is by far the most diverse form of metal music, possibly the most diverse form of rock music,” he explained. “Mayhem are like the Prince or the David Bowie of black metal because they constantly reinvent themselves.”
The band’s taste in experimentation can be traced as far back as its 1987 EP, “Deathcrush,” which kicks off with the hypnotic, funereal “Silvester Anfang” by the Krautrock pioneer Conrad Schnitzler, a member of Tangerine Dream and Kluster who donated that instrumental after Euronymous tracked him down.
Mayhem has only released six proper full-length studio records — the latest, “Daemon,” came out in 2019 — but each has a distinct flair. The songs acquire extra dimensions live, when Csihar, one of rock’s most spectacular vocalists, unleashes ear-bending sounds closer to Diamanda Galás’s experimentations than to cookie-cutter growling.
The anniversary show explores this entire arc, the four-decade period held together by subject matter that always draws from the grim or occult, but also possesses a twisted kind of cathartic power.
“We’re not dealing with love songs or the countryside,” Necrobutcher said. “We are dealing with the dark, aggressive, bad. But there is tragedy and sadness as well, which is also beautiful. A lot of people have told me over the years that our music had helped them through some rough times. I know what they’re talking about because I also use music for therapy.”
Csihar, for his part, is happy that the band can now play the same extreme music without the costs exacted in the old days. “I remember in the early ’90s when all the stuff happened, the churches and murders — that was almost too much for me when the murder happened in the band,” he said, laughing. “It’s strange how we could go this long together. Maybe we do less crazy things, but the love for music and art is the same, or even more.”
Necrobutcher, genial behind his video chat screen, did not feel ready to let go, either.
“If I see a possibility for a 50th anniversary dangling in front of me,” he said, chuckling, “I’m going to go the extra yard to get there.”
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