Hellhammer on why most black metal drummers irritate him

Twenty-three minutes with the most important drummer in black metal history. No click-bait. No drama. Just Jan Axel Blomberg sitting behind a kit and talking about why he plays the way he plays.

The best part is not the Mayhem stories. It is the moment where he explains why most modern black metal drummers irritate him. They sit on the snare doing the same blast pattern over every riff regardless of what the guitars are doing. No musical reason. Just speed for the sake of speed. “The drummer should always complement the music that is already there and not create its own thing without any reason for it.” Coming from the man who played on De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas, that hits different.

Then the Arcturus section. He talks about a drum pattern that was originally a mistake by Sverd on a drum machine. An omitted beat that sounded wrong. Hellhammer kept it, altered it, and turned it into something nobody else would have played. That is the difference between a session drummer and a musician. He hears errors and turns them into signatures.

The bit about “trueness” is worth the click alone. Someone asks how he reconciles his love for wave and jazz with the black metal purity code. His answer: “Black metal is about thinking for yourself. Not following some idiot that says you have to do this to be true. I never did that.” Four sentences that say more about the genre than every corpse-painted Instagram post combined.

He also pays for his own gear. Does not want free endorsement kits he has to return. Wants to own his drums the way you own a car. Fourteen Sonor kits. That man collects drums the way the rest of us collect records.

Grab the vinyl: Mayhem - De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas on vinyl