Avant-Garde Black Metal

Avant-garde black metal is a current of black metal, centred on Norway in the second half of the 1990s, in which the genre's tremolo-picked guitars, blast beats and shrieked vocals were opened to progressive rock structures, jazz harmony, carnival theatrics and electronic music. Bands such as *Ulver*, *Arcturus* and *Ved Buens Ende* treated the black metal vocabulary as material for composition rather than as a fixed formula, favouring abrupt shifts of texture, clean singing and keyboards. The style overlapped with the wider post-black metal field, but retained the second wave's instrumentation and recording aesthetics while discarding its ideological conservatism.