Slow and Accelerating Violence at the Edge of Apocalypse: Black Metal’s Dark Ecosophy as Strategy of Resistance Against Climate and Social Breakdown

In metal studies, connections between nature, ecology and philosophy emerge most explicitly in black metal practice and theory (bmp&t) and often in combination with black metal’s trajectory towards and representations of the apocalypse and the void. In the context of escalating climate and social crisis, this chapter will focus on bmp&t when it engages with dark futurist thinking and ecological concerns to question the broader relationships between climate crisis, right wing ideology and ideas about the apocalypse as they resonate with current anxieties about accelerating trajectories toward climate and social breakdown. It asks critical questions about the dark ecosophy within bmp&t and aims to expand on its potential. To date, discourse about this relationship has been predominantly established by white male theorists in correspondence with primarily white male musicians as the dominant subjects of black metal music and subcultures. This discourse is frequently underscored with a trajectory towards brutal destruction based on an accelerationist logic. Through discourse and listening analysis, the chapter questions the intersections between black metal ecological philosophy, accelerationist theory and the characterization of pace as both practice and theory veers towards an ultimate void or inevitable apocalypse. This analysis prompts a critique that raises the significance of gender as both repressed and fundamental to bmp&t’s concepts of pace, anticapitalism and trajectories towards the abyss, meaninglessness, death. Tracks from doom band Bismuth and black metal band Dawn Ray’d, reorientate the pace and logic provided by bmp&t, complicating pace, tempo, trajectories and offering a philosophy with ramifications for how one might reimagine the void and ecological futures.