Black metal has a long and notorious history: isolation, murder, Satanism, and even nationalism have been associated with some of its most infamous practitioners. The music itself is icy, dissonant, and chaotic.
Of course, black metal—and metal in general—has continued to splinter and evolve over the past three decades, while in many cases still clinging to the genre’s bleak origins. Since their inception, Finland’s Oranssi Pazuzu have been labeled as black metal, even though they’ve shape-shifted into something quite different. That said, there’s still a flickering darkness, something guitarist/vocalist Jun-His (born Juho Vanhanen) says could be a byproduct of the members’ upbringings.
“I bet there’s something about the Finnish winter, because it gets really dark,” he says by phone from his homebase in Tampere, Finland. “I write during the winter quite a lot, because there’s catharsis in that. Finnish mentality is also part of it—not everyone expresses his or her feelings. So maybe we express them through music. It’s so hard to say when you are inside that region or culture.”