No band has a worse reputation in the underground black metal scene than the "Swedish posers" Watain. Not only are they despised by the black metal scene at large for playing riffless mallcore (more on this later), but even within the Swedish black metal community, they are hated for their constant petty attacks on other Swedish musicians (Quorthon, Jon Nödtveidt, Set Teitan) to try and build themselves up as the "face" of Swedish black metal.
Their trajectory mirror that of the Norwegian band Gorgoroth, which even hired Vice Media in the 2000s to make an entirely fake documentary about how Gaahl and Infernus "invented" black metal - the documentary is literally called "True Norwegian Black Metal" and is 1h30 of Vice Media claiming Gorgoroth was the first black metal band... no mention of Burzum, Darkthrone, Mayhem or Immortal. This was all covered in the Heavy Metal Master Class, which we reviewed last week.
But rather than focus on the controversies surrounding Watain, let's instead talk about the music... and it isn't great, to say the least.
While many would classify "black metalcore" as a type of black metal, it's more appropriate to call it a type of metalcore with (very) superficial black metal aesthetics. The origins can be traced back to Dimmu Borgir's big sellout album, "Enthrone Darkness Triumphant", although there are of course other examples of the style.
Blackened Metalcore, and why Watain is not Black Metal
The principal difference between blackened mallcore or "black metalcore" and actual black metal is in the use of the vocals and riffs. Essentially, "black metalcore" has the radio rock format of riffs as a background, and vocally led music, making the genre closer to Dua Lipa with distortion than anything Burzum or Mayhem related.
Which brings us back to Watain. Watain started out as a fairly generic Darkthrone-clone band on "Casus Luciferi". Not only was the album poorly received, it was barely received at all: Watain had dreams of "selling out", but they had nothing to sell.
Watain goes full "Reinkaos" (or tries)
So starting with "Lawless Darkness", they turned to ex-Dissection guitarist Set Teitan to capitalise on the "Reinkaos" trend of combining AC/DC hard rock riffing with black metal vocals.
This was at a point in time where many bands were in a constant search of "novelty" and weren't above trend hopping, and using gimmicks picked up here and there from other extreme metal genres.
Following Teitan's departure, Watain found themselves having lost their only talented musician... they naturally turned to war metal, or whatever nonsense they tried to pass off as war metal, on "Trident Wolf Eclipse". Needless to say, that album had absolutely nothing to do with what Warkvlt, Blasphemy and Khranial were playing. Calling it "war metal" was really just a way for Watain to hide the fact that they were, again, back to playing metalcore.
The love affair between Watain and metalcore is really one of the most idiotic and pointless stories of all black metal canon. But when we hear about "black shoegaze" and "black 'n roll", we must remember that the bands that opened the gates for such futility were often already established bands looking for a way to make a quick buck on the rising popularity of black metal as a sub-culture.
A cautionary tale against the excesses of genre fusion and, most of all, against all things "core".
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