Yeah, I admit it: I'm a kvltist. A cross-armed, unimpressed, glaring disapprovingly kvltist. Some folks call us "gate keepers", others "vibe killers", and even more besides "assbeard neckholes". Or something. However you view us, we're a distinct breed of metal fan, much maligned, branded with the ick, and invariably on the "mature" side.
For those of you who don't know what I mean, I, for better or worse, am a specifically black metal-styled elitist. It's not really anything to be proud of, but this is me owning my bullshit. In my defense, though, underground metal elitism was par for the course for lots of us in the late '90s/early '00s once we reached a certain level of underground discovery, and so to a degree this is all nurture and you really can't blame me for anything. This fully excuses any mean, exclusionary attitudes that I might have about objectively dumb shit like post-black metal and "blackgaze" (just shut the fuck up, all of you. Shut up, sit down, and take your nap).
Do I take myself and my protectionist attitudes about BM fully seriously? No. I openly enjoy norsecore and silly shit like Covenant's debut, I don't think black metal has to have Satanic lyrics and themes in order to be black metal like some hardliners, and I love a lot of the wild evolutions of BM we've seen recently, like the crossovers with oi! and crust, and the keller synth/tänzelcore thing. This isn't really the point though: I never said I was a purist.
Nope: I'm a kvltist. There's a lot of overlap between the two, and lots of folks are certainly both, but by my reckoning, being a kvltist means that I strongly disapprove of bands/albums whose existence would somehow "sully" black metal's overall kvltness - so hipster black metal, etc. - and also gatekeep against people who are interested in black metal "for the wrong reasons" - so hipsters, etc. Basically, it's an attitude assumed to attempt to keep black metal "pvre" and "trve", and "out of the wrong hands". "But wait, didn't you just say you liked goofy shit like keller synth? How is that ok?" Glad you asked! When it comes to evolutions/hybrids of BM, they're totally fine as long as the true spirit of black metal remains intact and well-represented. So, black metal/oi! crossovers like early Akitsa? Great! Avant-garde, folky experimentation like whatever Peste Noire was doing on La Chaise-Dyable? Beautiful. Wacky, techno-infused tänzelcore like Bergënot? Bring it. In all of those cases, the atavistic, romantic spirit that's integral to black metal is present. In shit like Liturgy, Krallice, Deafheaven, it's just not. An argument could be made that what is and isn't enforced by the kvlt police is ultimately subjective and dependent upon the preferences and ideas of the kvltist in question, but this much is undeniable: you know true black metal, or at least its essence, when you hear it. You also know when it's lacking, and it's the duty of us kvltists to do what we can to uphold the former and vehemently discourage the later.
Back in the early '00s when I was a teenager, I truly thought I was a kvltist, but the thing about being one is that there has to be something to defend against, and while we might have manufactured boogeymen in the form of the "experimental" Moonfog releases or "posers" like Cradle of Filth and Dimmu Borgir, none of that stuff actually posed a threat. That era of Moonfog was awesome, Cradle of Filth is classic black-goth-whatever metal, and while Dimmu Borgir is and has always been boring as hell, they still feel like a black metal band. So yeah, loved and believed in right, proper BM so much so even back then that I was willing to "defend it" against anything that was decided as unkvlt, but because of the lack of anything actually dangerous for its integrity, I can't say that I was a full-on kvltist in those days. Life was simple, the world was magical, and we didn't know how good we had it.
And then 2010 hit.
I'll never forget it, because 2010 was when the heartless internet burned a now-notorious video by a band called Liturgy onto the surface of my brain. Throughout my life, I've had a number of traumatic things happen to me, but the very most so are certainly these: an incredibly close-call car accident when I was 16 that nearly killed my girlfriend and me; the sudden, rapid deterioration and death of my father due to renal cell cancer when I was 23, and; the first time I watched that godforsaken Liturgy video on YouTube and became aware of Hunter Hunt-Hendrix. I can divide my life into two eras: blissful pre-Liturgy, and dream-shattered post-Liturgy, because it was with them that I realized that hipsters had taken an interest in black metal. Can you believe it? Of all the things that they could have latched onto, this cohort of shitty artschool students heard about it, found it overflowing with raw elements ready for crafting into tokens of "cultural capital", and bam! You have these shitheads starting a "black metal band":