Early Norwegian black metal scene

"I was very fortunate to not get involved in any of [the church burnings] in that respect, but I think we were all very consumed with the whole thing. The attention it got. [...] All the negative attention and our local community’s reaction to it, it became fuel to the fire. It exaggerated this feeling of ‘us and them’. So I felt involved like that and in my band there were of course consequences. [...] And you can’t really deny that it kind of validated the seriousness of what we were doing. I heard someone talking about young rap artists these days who start doing criminal activity to give credibility and validity to the things they’re singing about. [...] It’s a very strange teenage thing, some kind of rebellious wish to have power and be taken seriously. To be dangerous. Because when you’re a teenager you’re also so vulnerable. We don’t have to psychoanalyse it all but as a grown-up I think it’s much easier to see how this happened."

"I don’t think [the church burnings] had a political agenda. I know that some of them are very extreme in their political agenda today, but they were young boys. I think they stopped thinking as individuals and started thinking more as a group, to impress each other, and to shock. They were in this bubble where, finally, you get immune: you take one step further, and then another, and before you know it, it’s not a big deal to kill a man."

"These Norwegian kids were doing things that mainstream folk may have assumed metal musicians did all the time. To say the least, this was not a good look for rock music."

"Christianity never suited Norway. It never belonged here. The black metal scene reacted to that. We needed to have something to be opposite to."

"Our purpose is to spread fear and evil."

"That’s why we started to wear our hair all black. We were singing about Satan and sadism, and everything that was wrong like torture and stuff like that — the opposite of hanging around at the beach [...] We were looking for perversity and craziness."

"The cops came to my parents’ place late at night, just to go through my room. I was 17. They were trying to find something that connected me to something. They left empty-handed, but they’d found some strange imagery on CDs and were nodding to each other like: ‘Jackpot.’"

"The starkness and coldness of Norway itself is embedded in the bones of"

"Today, we all find it kind of funny and sad at the same time. [...] Take Ivar from Enslaved: back then, we were writing stuff to each other that was so ugly, we had to look over our shoulders all the time. But today we’re the best of friends and we’re really embarrassed about all that stuff. A couple of years ago Kampfar won a Norwegian Grammy, and we were sitting there at the same table with Enslaved. We’re the same guys that back then sent death threats to each other. And we’re sitting there now in suits, drinking wine, eating fancy dinners. It was like: ‘How crazy is this?’” Pretty crazy."

"[The killing of Euronymous] is an old traditional fight, slandering and death threats start to fly between two people, and in the end one of them says, ‘You know what, I’m going to ... kill you' [...] That’s very traditional and mixed with power, money."

"[Euronymous] had the belief, the more extreme the better, the more unbelievable the better. [...] Then you have someone like Vikernes who comes in and starts taking it at face value, saying, ‘We can’t just talk about this stuff. We’ve got to do it.’ It was the combination of the two of them meeting that pushed things over the edge."