Do we REALLY need (The True) Mayhem?
When I first started getting into metal music, and being blown away by the heaviness of Slayer and Slipknot at age 13, I distinctly remember the Satanic imagery those bands used at various points: from Slayer’s overt and graphic artwork by the late, great Larry Carrol and use of sword pentagrams and inverted crosses, or the early days of Slipknot when they would use a Baphomet pentagram banner, and the frequent goat imagery like the cover of Iowa (2001) and various goat heads displayed on stage. At the time it made those bands feel dangerous, like I shouldn’t even be listening or watching them, more so given the fact I was raised Catholic. That eventually led me down a Wikipedia rabbit hole where I discovered the existence of black metal, though it would be many, many years until I got into it, and of course, I came across the name Mayhem.
Art by Larry Carroll
SLAYER © Steve Jennings
Photography by M. Shawn “Clown” Crahan
Slipknot live c. 2001.
Mayhem—aka The True Mayhem (more on that later)—is, of course the premiere and infamous Norwegian black metal band widely attributed as the pioneers of the subgenre and its various aesthetics, trappings and beliefs. This band’s notorious lore and backstory have been repeated so often and with various degrees of seriousness that it’s basically become a meme; sometimes it’s funny, like the various photos of Euronymous (aka Øystein Aarseth) and Kristia- I mean Varg Vikernes looking like pompous dorks, or that one Sam Dunn interview of Necrobutcher (aka Jørn Stubberud) waxing drunkenly. Other times it gets cringey and even creepy, as is the current stanning of Dead aka Per Ohlin on TikTok. Nevertheless, it’s not incorrect to assume that Mayhem are an influential household name, and ever since their reformation in 1995 they’ve continued to tour and release music with considerable success. However, over the years, I’ve started to wonder a number of things about Mayhem as an entity, brand and band, particularly how a large number of other, younger black metal bands seem to have a very dismissive and at times hostile view of Mayhem. These anti-Mayhem bands in particular interested me because among listeners and enthusiasts this is of course nothing new, as the band has had much acclaim and derision for a multitude of reasons, but my overall conclusion from noticing this is the following question. Do we really need Mayhem?
That’s a loaded question, obviously, but it is something that has been bothering me. Full disclosure, I am one of the weirdos that does like Mayhem’s post-reunion music, and their string of albums with their current lineup has been enjoyable, and I am somewhat curious about their newest album Liturgy of Death. With that said, one thing that does bother me about Mayhem and their oft-repeated lore is how it has basically obfuscated a lot of stuff about them that in my opinion shouldn’t be swept under the rug; just because the current members and some of the former ones aren’t infamous murderers who now waste away schizophrenically posting racist bullshit on The App Formerly Known as Twitter™ while hawking a shitty D&D ripoff and autobiography (incidentally, fuck Varg, Burzum and his fans) doesn’t mean they should get a pass. In fairness, none of the current, living members of Mayhem have been involved in fash nonsense, at least not overtly—black metal festivals are a Schrödinger’s sketch cat but we’re not gonna get into that today—but when they first reformed in the mid-to-late ’90s they sure were using a lot of fascist imagery and their drummer Hellhammer (aka Jan Axel Blomberg) was certainly spewing racist bullshit himself. They also used the tired excuse of “black metal’s supposed to be dangerous and evil brah;” while they thankfully cut that shit out, this arc of their story, as well as how shitty Euronymous also was, often gets downplayed or ignored. It’s one of the reasons a lot of people rightfully don’t like Mayhem to begin with even if you exclude Louis Cachet (Varg’s French republic legal name) from the equation, and of course, the reason why much of that isn’t talked about is due to the lore overtaking everything else.
Even amid the mockery and more serious fault-finding, people still care about Mayhem’s lore. On its own it is a fascinating story: a local band of Norwegian suburbanites engage in self-destructive behavior and escalate it to the point of crimes. On a psychological level you can see why it gets so much hype or attention: there’s something truly disturbing as to why well-off kids with very little to complain about would gravitate towards extremes, and this is primarily in regards to Euronymous, because the case of Dead is actually tragic. A lot has been said about Per Ohlin’s mental struggles and how joining Mayhem was probably the worst decision he could’ve made since it only worsened his already fragile state of mind, eventually leading him to suicide, but back to the Norwegians for a moment. I think so many people hyper-fixate on the lore because there’s a number of things that simply do not make sense, even with a better understanding of human psychology and trauma response. No amount of psychoanalyzing and misdiagnosing sociopathic tendencies, greed or egomania can explain why Euronymous’ first response to seeing Ohlin’s corpse was to photograph it, or allegedly send skull fragments and brain matter vials to his pen pals, and that Hellhammer was perfectly OK with going along with this madness. It simply doesn’t register as normal or explainable, because it isn’t; Varg on the other hand is of course a narcissistic, raging bigot who hated Euronymous, at least with that you can rationalize why he burned churches and killed the guy—who by then had a notoriously bad reputation for ripping people off—and then on top of all that, a full-length album of music was released after all of these crazy events took place.
The only way I can even rationalize why people are so fascinated towards this band’s story to the point of ignoring or downplaying their shitty actions afterwards is the same type of morbid curiosity people have for true crime, that rush people feel when they read about violent crimes or treating these types of destructive tendencies as exotic entertainment. The more cynical part of me, as someone who already knows this story and finds the constant retelling tedious, believes that this story gets retold again and again because everything that happened afterwards, even with the aforementioned flirting with sketchiness, is boring. Mayhem without the lore is uninteresting; while the music may have a consistent and at times better songwriting quality than the one album and EP people often mention, their story after De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas is just boring. In many ways, Mayhem are similar to Mötley Crüe, that band has basically coasted for decades solely through their story, one that insanely kept going well beyond their heyday, be it arrests, lawsuits, leaked sex tapes or extended media like documentaries, a movie and a prestige TV limited series. Granted, Mayhem can at least boast of not having restraining orders from their children and ex-spouses, but the effect is the same: the lore keeps them famous, and even Mayhem have started using their own lore for marketing, when they play in large venues they project a collage of footage and photos of their days with Euronymous and Dead, and they’ve frequently invited former members to play the classics, and even included recorded backing vocals by Dead and yet, they don’t come off as whorish as Mötley Crüe often does, which is odd considering the various boxsets and reissues of every split second of recorded audio and footage they can find of Dead and Euronymous.
In this one regard, it could be argued that the point of Mayhem is as the poster boys of black metal in a very literal sense. Their lore is basically myth, one that keeps being retold and it’s the first thing people come across when they first get into black metal, and the band themselves have fully embraced the self-mythologizing, and lest we forget how people were willing to donate actual money to restore the black metal tourist trap that is the space where Euronymous had set his record store Helvete after it caught fire in 2024. The accidental black comedy Lords of Chaos (2019) for better or worse also gave Mayhem even more exposure, which brings us to today and the band is still somehow relevant for a large number of people despite very few people talking about the music, and not just the albums after 1994.
Ever since the aforementioned Lord of Chaos biopic and the release of Mayhem’s 6th full-length Daemon, both in 2019, I’ve seen a lot of interviews and comments from various bands, label heads and fans that have a lot of strong opinions about Mayhem for one reason or another. One I’ve seen a lot is the dismissal of De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas, mainly decrying the music as mediocre or bland, and saying that the lore behind it is what keeps it afloat. While I can’t say I completely disagree, I do get the sentiment, and there are indeed better black metal albums from that time by Mayhem’s contemporaries that were more interesting and have aged better. For my money the records Darkthrone and Enslaved released during that period are more visionary, but at the same time, to this day there’s no band that sounds exactly like Mayhem did on Mysteriis–and not for a lack of trying. That record may not be as dynamic or forward-thinking as other albums of the time, but there’s a reason this album has had such a definitive influence in spite of all the baggage and lore behind it, and many bands have of course taken note of it. At the same time however, it is true that Mysteriis on its own is not that special, more so if you’ve exposed yourself to other black metal records; however, that’s ironically what makes the album such an anomaly: it’s still influencing the entire genre despite being reevaluated and deconstructed to oblivion, especially when paired next to all the Mayhem albums that came afterwards.
Mayhem’s discography as a whole can be best described as consistent but unfocused; the biggest case is the radical change in sound and presentation between DMDS and 2000’s Grand Declaration of War. That album was a progressive and experimental affair with spoken word passages and sampling, and lyrically the band also ditched the “Satan My Master”-type lyricism in favor of Nietzschean philosophy and existentialism. (This period is also when Mayhem were flirting with fascist imagery and the response to that album was polarizing to say the least.) 4 years later the band released Chimera, an album that scaled back almost all the prog and avant-garde leanings for a more traditional record albeit with more dynamic songwriting, and while it has its fans, it’s also just there, it’s a record that exists, and the same can be said for all the records that followed, with the most noteworthy aspect of 2007’s Ordo ad Chao and 2014’s Esoteric Warfare being their astoundingly bad production sound. Even 2019’s Daemon which had the media boost from the Lord of Chaos biopic and featured the band’s best production quality and was an overall much better put together record was met with the same tepid level of interest: another Mayhem record, diehards celebrated, detractors groaned and everyone else shrugged, and that also seems to be the case with Liturgy of Death.
As an entity, Mayhem exists in some sort of limbo where they’re too significant in the world of extreme metal to dismiss but not interesting enough beyond their heyday infamy, even though musically they’ve been consistent or at the very least dedicated to their craft, in large part thanks to former guitarist Blasphemer and current guitarists Teloch and Ghul. Those 3 in their respective stints have admittedly done an excellent job at preventing the band from having a downright awful album, songwriting-wise that is. But given this unique dilemma for the band, it also makes sense why they constantly exalt their lore and added that little “The True” scribble above their logo. There really is no other band like them, none of the other black metal bands reached this level of worldwide notoriety—which is for the better because of how many goddamn nazis and abusers plague this cesspool of a subgenre—but the band themselves despite basically achieving the standing disdainfully departed Euronymous wanted, they are simply content to rest on those laurels, they’re here to perform, make albums and not a single thing else, neither good, nor bad.
And this finally brings me to my conclusion of the question of the title: do we need Mayhem, or what’s their point? And the answer is kinda, for better and worse, this band’s standing and overall point and reason to exist is like a glass ceiling of sorts. Black metal, despite being designed to oppose the mainstream, has slowly been creeping into the spotlight. Mayhem themselves have received various accolades and are seen as a significant cultural contributor in their homeland. Furthermore, black metal as a phenomenon exists entirely within its own realm but with less and less barriers to entry. Despite some elitists going on their trillionth tirade against [insert trendy metal artist here], there’s a reason major festivals like Wacken and Bloodstock are chock full of bands from almost every metal subgenre, and that’s basically the mountaintop for metal. Mayhem occupies the same pedestal as Slayer or Cannibal Corpse, they serve as the goal in terms of relevance but at the same time, no other black metal band has achieved that infamy or marketed as successfully as Mayhem did. Despite all the warranted criticism they get, they at least know their place for the most part since their post-Euronymous reunion, and at the same time, you absolutely do not have to care about Mayhem at all if you do not want to, lore or not, they simply exist, and to quote a joke from Lewis Lovhaug aka Linkara, Mayhem is over there, and over there can take care of itself.
