Greetings from Central Appalachia! Our mountains are old and beautiful, and they carry a long tradition of economic exploitation, with its people caricatured in popular culture as hillbillies and rednecks. Central Appalachia—and specifically western Pennsylvania, eastern Tennessee and West Virginia—blends natural beauty, environmental destruction, human suffering and dogged persistence in a way that makes it an idea garden for extreme music... and especially for black metal, which thrives on juxtaposition of the ugly and the transcendent.

The projects of Johnson City, Tennessee’s Paul Ravenwood—including prolific atmospheric black metal outfit Twilight Fauna and neofolk Green Elder—more explicitly embrace Appalachian culture. Ravenwood builds albums around the mountains, his life experiences growing up there, and finding solitude and inspiration in nature. Twilight Fauna stayed busy in 2017, releasing a full-length and a split with Evergreen Refuge, while Green Elder released a full-length. Twilight Fauna plans to release a new LP, Where Birds Sing My Name, in summer 2018, and Green Elder will release a split seven-inch with Horse Cult in the fall.

Atmospheric black metallers Panopticon’s 2012 Kentucky album stands as the best-known Appalachian metal album, despite the fact that Austin Lunn has disclaimed it as such; it was created in Louisville, where Lunn was living at the time, and was intended to represent Kentucky as a whole. Even so, Kentucky just feels Appalachian, from its juxtaposition of harsh black metal with folksy, bluegrass-influenced instrumentation, to its strong lyrical themes of labor, rebellion, and the natural world, to the ghostly coal miner gracing its verdant, evocative album art.

The mountains and geographic isolation of Appalachia have created an artistic movement, albeit one spread over a sprawling region that encompasses 13 states and broad regional diversity. Appalachia’s black metal bands reflect that variation, with broad differences in style and perspective. Yet these bands are connected, both thematically and in many cases through collaboration.

“There’s stuff on there that acts as a confessional, almost,” Thieler explains. “The things that I’ve done, where I’ve been, the kind of person I thought i was at different times in my life, the times i ran away from my faith, the times I struggled with doubt, the times I’ve been angry at God, when I was suicidal and alcoholic, when my grandma died. I talk about the abuse from when I was a kid. [Writing the album] led me to look through some of the writing that I had done 12, 15 years ago, even finding a snippet of a suicide note I had written when I was 17. It’s a really angry record. It’s all the low points in my life.“

Thieler can still remember the first time he heard heavy metal. He was just a kid, riding around with his dad in a 60s Mercury Cougar, listening to Christian metal bands like Tourniquet and Vengeance Rising. He began playing drums with his parents’ Christian rock band, before eventually becoming disaffected and striking out on his own. His early recordings continued with those Christian lyrical themes, though, with lyrics from and about the Bible. Slaves B.C.’s first demo, which Thieler describes as “terrible,” was about the apocalyptic book of Revelations, while its first full-length, All is Dust and I Am Nothing is based upon "a subject matter that is as bleak as the music, the book of Ecclesiastes.” Lo, and I Am Burning taps into spirituality as well, although this time, it's all coming from an angrier place.

Josh Thieler, who has played drums for Twilight Fauna since 2016, and as a result, has become a force in both eastern Tennessee's and Pittsburgh's metal scenes. Thieler’s band, Slaves B.C., will release its sophomore full-length, Lo, and I Am Burning, on March 16 via Thieler's own The Fear and the Void Recordings . The album sees them maintain the raw, discordant black metal sound of its debut, while rounding out its sound with elements of doom and death metal.

“I take a lot of hikes if the weather permits, and if not, I just go out and drive around in the mountains,” Mills says. “They’re visually inspiring to me, just the majesty of the mountains, and the epicness of looking around. There’s also a heavy tradition, a lot of heritage in the mountains. People born and raised in Appalachia, it’s so deeply engrained in them from the past that they never can get away from that. Even when I lived in the city for 14 years, I constantly wished I could be back in the mountains.”

Now going on its seventh year, Vials of Wrath grew out of Mills’ interest in black metal’s nature, pagan, and folk influences. As with Slaves BC, Mills tells Noisey that the new album is influenced by a dark period in his personal life, in which multiple family members passed away during the winter months. That led to the album’s title and its sound, which Mills says has a darker, colder feel than his past albums, and although Thieler plays drums on Dark Winter Memories, Mills’ creativity remains linked to solitude.

Thieler also played drums on the forthcoming album from Vials of Wrath , a previously one-man band based outside the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in Maryville, Tennessee. That album, Dark Winter Memories, is Vials of Wrath’s third LP, and will be released later in 2018. Said album showcases the project's hazy, hypnotic black metal, which stems from founder Dempsey Mills. Mills grew up in southern West Virginia and played in Charlotte metalcore band Bloodline Severed before moving to eastern Tennessee.

Slaves BC’s blackened death metal has grown more intense as well. Thieler’s experience stretching himself to play blastbeats for extended periods with Twilight Fauna has given him confidence to go harder with his own band; according to him, the band has picked up a new, speedier pace, often writing songs and recording them later the same evening.

Farther north, in central West Virginia, Ulfrinn also taps into the majesty—and melancholy—of the mountains. Dalton Miller, who creates the music of Ulfrinn in Gassaway, West Virginia, also incorporates spirituality into his music, although he comes from a quite different perspective than Thieler or Mills.

“Spiritually, I’ve been a practicing pagan for a long time, not in the neo-pagan sense but in animus with nature,” Miller says. “The more in harmony I live with the land here, with the mountains here, the more I become environmentally aware. Mountaintop removal [a destructive coal strip-mining practice] feels like decapitating my gods to me. That does affect the music. There’s a feeling here that’s forlorn. It does have a melancholy. It resonates because of the history we have.“

Miller grew up in a family of bluegrass musicians and has been playing guitar since age 10, but he says he’s never really liked country music, and instead “wanted to play something darker and abrasive.” He married at age 18; the rapid dissolution of his marriage and the drama that ensued—which included an in-law setting his house aflame—prompted the development of Ulfrinn.

“I lost everything I had, completely,” Miller says. “I felt betrayed by everyone and everything around me. Ulfrinn was when I decided i was going to take that and turn it in to something positive instead of killing myself. It became an expression of the darkness I was going through. It was like alchemy: I was taking something that was horrible that was going to destroy me, and I’m turning it into art that someone else can appreciate.”

Miller released the first Ulfrinn demo on Bandcamp in August 2015, and since then, has set a blistering pace, releasing eight collections of music before finally releasing his first proper full-length, Mountains of Melancholy, last December. It speaks to West Virginia’s current moment: devastated by widespread opioid abuse, exploited by big business, lied to by politicians—and yet still overwhelmingly, enduringly beautiful.