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Many Credit Venom With Being The First Black Metal Band, But Were They?

Many credit Venom as being the first “Black Metal Band“, but were they really? If you listen to Motorhead and Venom in 1985 (or now) you might notice some similarities.

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Venom is the band that named black metal and is usually treated as its starting point, but “first” depends on whether you mean the name, the aesthetic, or the sound later bands locked in.

They formed in Newcastle in 1979. The 1981 debut Welcome to Hell already had the Satanic lyrics, crude production, and speed that set them apart from straight NWOBHM. The follow-up, Black Metal (1982), put the phrase on the cover and in the title track. That album is the moment the genre got a name. Cronos, Mantas, and Abaddon were deliberately cartoon-evil and lo-fi; later bands took the pose seriously.

The usual “first wave” list is Venom, Bathory, Hellhammer/Celtic Frost, and Mercyful Fate. Bathory’s early records (1984 onward), especially Under the Sign of the Black Mark, are closer to what the Norwegian second wave actually sounded like. Quorthon has said Venom was the spark; Mayhem, Darkthrone, and Burzum then treated Bathory as the real template. Hellhammer’s Satanic Rites and early Celtic Frost sit in the same proto zone.

So the clean version:

First to use the term and push the Satanic/raw image as the whole point: Venom.
First to sound like the black metal that defined the 1990s: more Bathory than Venom.
Occult metal before either of them (Sabbath, Angel Witch, early Mercyful Fate) existed, but nobody called it black metal.

Collectors and historians almost always credit Venom as the originators for that reason. The second wave is a different chapter.