In a quest to live up to their satanic image, the black metal band Mayhem embarked on a journey of cut-throat ambition and tragic endings

On the 8 of April 1991, 22-year-old Per Yngve Ohlin, lead singer of the revered black metal band Mayhem, took a hunting knife to both his wrists and throat, before shooting himself in the head with a shotgun. His housemate and fellow band member Euronymous, upon discovering his friend—rather than call the authorities—proceeded to go to the nearest shop and buy a disposable camera to photograph the body. This photograph would later become the cover for the band’s bootleg live album, The Dawn of the Black Hearts, drawing widespread criticism from sections of the metal community, and causing a fracture within the band itself. All this raises the question: when does edginess go too far? Were the actions of Euronymous a grim exploitation of a friend’s death or was he simply living up to the nihilistic message of the band?

The story of Mayhem begins in a small village on the outskirts of Oslo, with the meeting of guitarist Øystein Aarseth a.k.a Euronymous, and bassist Jørn Stubberud a.k.a Necrobutcher, both 16-year-old teenagers with a penchant for rebellion and an obsession with the darkest elements of heavy metal and slasher films. With perversion and anarchy at the core of their message, they pushed back at the camp and kitsch imagery of the glam rock movement and curated for themselves a macabre and dark aesthetic—separating them clearly from the conservative Christian circles that surrounded them.

The direction of the band began to take an even darker turn when they were joined by Ohlin, who at the time was a gifted but disturbed young metal singer from Sweden. In later years it would be speculated that Ohlin suffered from Cotard’s syndrome also known as walking corpse syndrome, an extremely rare mental disorder, in which the sufferer believed themselves not to be alive, but rather a corpse that was already dead.

Alongside lyrics filled with morbid allusions to death and the afterlife, Ohlin introduced face paint that made him look like a corpse to the band and even introduced a brutal theatricality, that involved slicing his arms on stage, as well as throwing severed pig’s heads into the audience. In an interview for the fanzine Slayer, Dead explained that this behaviour was to expel posers at their concerts. He claimed, “Before we began to play there was a crowd of about 300…but in the second song Necrolust we began to throw around those pig heads. Only 50 were left.” This concept of posers within the black metal scene would become an important theme that would eventually result in much destruction and death.

With the suicide of Ohlin in 1991, the band began to fracture, with bassist Necrobutcher taking particular offence to the way that Euronymous had conducted himself in the wake of Ohlin’s suicide. “My friend kills himself, and then my best friend finds the body, and instead of having a reaction of sorrow and grief, he reacted differently and took photos of the body,” Necrobutcher said. “I was like, ‘You have to get rid of those photos or I will never see you again.’ ” At this point in the band’s history, the anti-establishment message was in full force, and right at the centre of this counter-cultural maelstrom was the enigmatic figure of Euronymous.

Euronymous, the lead guitarist and de facto leader of the band, was amassing a small group of cult-like followers that he would dub the “black circle”. This group of fervent fans and friends were attracted to his provocative promotion of the band and his exaggerations of evil intent. Euronymous claimed that in the aftermath of Ohlin’s suicide, he made a stew with parts of his brain as well as making necklaces with fragments of his skull, giving them to musicians that he deemed worthy. Whether or not these claims were just further evidence of Euronymous’ shameless promotional tactics to increase the allure and mystique of the band, or were legitimate, remains to this day shrouded in mystery.

With the rift between Euronymous and Necrobutcher seemingly irreversible, Mayhem saw a change in membership, with Necrobutcher leaving to be replaced by Kristian “Varg” Vikernes a.k.a Count Grishnackh. Vikernes, unlike Euronymous, left no reason to doubt his evil intentions with the band. He took the anti-establishment and rebellious ethos of the band to heart, and in no way saw it only as a marketing ploy.

Upon joining the band, Vikernes initiated a campaign of church arsons across Norway, including the 12th-century Fantoft Stave Church outside of Bergen—a historical landmark known for its wooden Norse dragon-head carvings. After it was set ablaze in 1992, Vikernes used a photograph of its charred remains as the cover for his next album, Aske (Norwegian for Ashes). He later told journalists for the Bergens Tidende newspaper that his only purpose was to “spread fear and evil.”

By 1993, tension between Euronymous and Vikernes was at a fever pitch, with the latter pushing for the band to become more and more extreme in their violence and social views. On the night of 10 August 1993, Vikerness visited the flat of Euronymous, stabbing him 23 times. The reason behind the murder, like many of the events that unfurled in the story of Mayhem is up for debate. Vikernes claims it was in self-defence, after death threats received from Euronymous, who allegedly was telling his close circle of friends, that he planned to kidnap and torture Vikernes, to make a snuff movie. While others claim that the murder came about due to debts connected to owed royalties between the two of them.

What does this series of events teach us in the grand scheme of things? If anything it is a useful glimpse into human nature, the social circles that we keep and the impassioned values we burn with as youthful teenagers. For this group of artists, destruction was not merely an emphatic form of escape but rather a unifying identity that their brotherhood could share. Yet with any ideal, there comes questions of authenticity and integrity. In the story of Mayhem, there is a blurry line: young men calling each other out as posers, not adhering to the counter-cultural rally call of rebellion that so succinctly wrapped them in their bubble, shielding them from the outside call of reason. A sad story that echoes themes of Greek tragedy—betrayal, passion, death and ultimately absurdity.

Words by James Elliott