It’s been 40 years since their formation, and a celebratory tour brings them to Knockdown Center on November 17th. But it’s a strange anniversary. Of their original lineup, only Necrobutcher remains. He plays with drummer Hellhammer, who joined the group in 1988, longtime vocalist Attila Csihar and guitarists Morten Bergeton "Teloch" Iversen and Charles "Ghul" Hedger, who came on between 2011-2012.

Both Euronymous and Dead - Mayhem’s two most infamous members - met gruesome ends as the band was becoming a breakout success. A deep dive into the group's early history is, by necessity, a case study in the dangers of believing your own hype and the violence that can come out of edgelord posturing. This is the first edition of our newsletter to require a trigger warning: Murder, suicide and mutilation are all part of Mayhem’s history. But the group that will be playing Knockdown Center next month is one that practically crawled out of its own self-immolation, determined to push musical extremes while forging a path away from the ugliest parts of their history.

Although they formed in 1984, it took a few years for Mayhem to solidify into the force-of-nature that would so profoundly affect all heavy metal that followed. For a group so marked by violence, Necrobutcher describes their first practices - covering Black Sabbath and Motörhead - with tender wistfulness. “The moment we started to play together, everybody knew that this was ‘it’. I can still remember the feeling we had, we were just so ecstatic that we had found each other.”

But once their vision solidified, there was no denying the group’s visceral impact. Not only were their aesthetics shocking - they innovated the now-ubiquitous corpsepaint and performed with dead animals on stage - but their music picked up the mantle of extreme metal with the fervor of a true believer. Over time, Euronymous would cultivate a mythos that placed Mayhem at the center of an insular scene that would produce a series of church burnings and killings.

Drawing inspiration from groups like Napalm Death, Sodom and, of course, Venom (who released their landmark Black Metal album in 1982), Mayhem dove headfirst into the waters of the then-nascent extreme metal subculture. It was a fertile space of gleeful rule breaking and sonic experimentation. Laypeople may struggle to parse the granular differences between the earliest, cross pollinating iterations of thrash metal, death metal, black metal, gore and extreme strains of hardcore, as all are marked by whiplash velocity, punishing sonics and confrontational ugliness. But once you acclimate to the darkness, the contrasts become more apparent. In this space, Mayhem distinguished themselves. While other groups articulated political or anti-capitalist critiques, Mayhem was disinterested in building a better world. They drew inspiration from “horror films, violent stuff, mysterious books” and “basically distanced ourselves from the rest of society.”

While Necrobutcher recalls a feeling of “brotherhood” with their peers, Euronymous’ view of their cohort was far from diplomatic: “Nowadays tons of bands are writing ‘social awareness’ lyrics and they still dare to call it Death Metal. BULLSHIT! I play in a Death Metal band, or maybe you should call it Black Metal, and the most important thing then is Death! Bands who claim to play Death Metal and are not into Death itself, are fakes, and can start to play punk instead. These people can die, they have betrayed the scene. Death Metal is for brutal people who are capable of killing, it's not for idiotic children who want to have a funny hobby after school.”

This showboating is easy enough to laugh off as the tirades of an overgrown adolescent. It’s much harder to dismiss their music, which remains some of the most savage and impactful metal ever to be put to tape. Their 1987 debut LP Deathcrush is a landmark album by any metric. In three short years, the group had evolved from riffing on Motörhead to a sound that was distilled, claustrophobic and menacing.

Deathcrush is a fearsome LP, but the best was yet to come. Lineup changes were a constant for the group; when a package arrived from a Swedish singer named Dead containing a crucified mouse and a demo tape, it caught the group’s attention. Mayhem invited him to fly in for an audition, but when he arrived he had brought all his belongings with him. He was committed whether the band liked it or not. Fortunately it was a perfect fit, and the slim body of work they made together before his tragic suicide stands as the essential moment Black Metal took full form.

1990’s Freezing Moon/Carnage demo is truly a step beyond. Dead’s vocals are ghoulish and incantatory, going past the guttural howls of Deathcrush into something more eerie and inhuman. The group sounds paradoxically both sludge-thick and blindingly nimble, and any vestige of fun is scraped away in favor of a demonic assault that starts at peak intensity and only builds from there. The no-fi production captures the searing intensity of the band, adding to the quasi-documentary quality of the recordings.

Dead’s lyrics are revealing: “diabolic shapes float by / out from the dark / I remember it was here I died / by following the freezing moon.” When he was ten years old, a group of bullies beat him so badly he was briefly declared clinically dead. It’s been speculated since that he suffered from Cotard’s syndrome, which the NIH describes as “any one of a series of delusions that range from a belief that one has lost organs, blood, or body parts to insisting that one has lost one's soul or is dead.” The corpse paint played into this too. “It wasn’t anything to do with the way Kiss and Alice Cooper did makeup,” said Necrobutcher. “Dead actually wanted to look like a corpse.”

Performances during this era were, no surprise, extreme. The group would decorate the stage with pig heads on stakes. “That was something we came up with in ’85,” Necrobutcher recalls. “What should a death metal band have on stage? They should have something that signifies death. And what could be better than a bunch of dead animals, especially when they won’t let you have dead humans.” Dead would at times cut himself, too, spilling blood onto the audience. A recording from a 1990 show in Leipzig is the only other recording to capture the “golden lineup” of the Freezing Moon/Carnage demo, with Dead singing and Euronymous on guitar alongside Necrobutcher and Hellhammer. Less than six months later, Dead would take his own life.

Tensions, already growing, overtook the band as Euronymous callously exploited Dead’s suicide for PR. Upon discovering his bandmate’s body, he purchased a disposable camera to take photos and collected shards of his bandmate’s skull. Only when he was finished did he call the police. These photos would tastelessly be used on the cover of a nonetheless-coveted live bootleg called The Dawn of the Black Hearts, and Euronymous floated a rumor that the suicide was a response to Black Metal becoming “trendy.” While these actions led Necrobutcher to quit the band in disgust, they invigorated a new, more chaotic peer group. Euronymous soon opened a record store called Helvete (trans. “hell”) as a social hub and outlet for his label Deathlike Silence.

Deathlike Silence released some of Mayhem’s most revered albums, but the label also brought other artists into their orbit, including Burzum. The solo project of Varg Vikernes, Burzum was a true believer in the nihilism and violence that animated the theater of Black Metal. He was also a proponent of Nazism and Odinism, a neo-pagan hate movement that draws on ancient Norse mythology. He soon embarked on a campaign of church burnings, and eventually murdered Euronymous in 1993. The reasons are disputed, but the fetishiation of death and violence that Euronymous had nurtured seemed now to turn on him. It’s a saga that goes far beyond the scope of this newsletter, and interested parties should check out the book Lords of Chaos and the documentary Until the Light Takes Us to learn more.

Prior to his death, Euronymous and Necrobutcher had reconciled, and he would lead Mayhem out of the tumult of its first decade into an era of musical maturity and stability. 1997’s Wolf’s Lair Abyss marked a turning point. It’s one of the band’s finest releases, with a bristling technicality and focused songcraft. It points the way forward to a world where Black Metal as a genre can grow and flourish, rather than consume itself. Vocalist Attila Csihar articulated this shift in perspective during a 2014 interview: “What is extremity? To me it’s always been you pushing your own boundaries. It’s you making a stronger or sharper point for yourself—a stronger aim, a further reach. It’s a fucking emotion. It’s a lifting. It’s not really how good you are musically. It’s not only about talent. It’s more about how you can manifest this feeling, which is really strong in the spirit and the whole feeling behind the music. It’s something you learn, but it’s also something that comes with instinct. You can play one tone, actually, in a way that people go fucking nuts. Who knows what happens in that split second of instinct?”

In the wake of Euronymous’ murder, Dead’s suicide, the church burnings (not to mention other horrific violence in the band’s larger scene not mentioned here), a reckoning was inevitable. Black Metal could either stand for reactionary self-destruction in the most literal sense, or it could chart a path towards life. Mayhem has represented the latter. They could have easily imploded at any number of points, but instead they’ve persevered beyond the chaos. Few bands make it to 40, we hope they have a few more decades left to go.