Hellhammer

Hellhammer is the stage name of Jan Axel Blomberg, an underground drummer who joined Mayhem after the release of its 1987 mini-LP Deathcrush. His place in the band’s early history is distinct from his later public statements: he entered as Mayhem’s reputation was growing, while interviews presented him as both an opponent of burning historic Norwegian churches and a speaker willing to countenance attacks on other religious sites. His comments on race, immigration, skinheads, and Øystein Aarseth’s murder further show how musical allegiance and political hostility intersect in the book’s account of the scene.

Identity and Entry into Mayhem

Mayhem’s first performance took place in 1985, before Blomberg joined. Its 1986 demo, Pure Fucking Armageddon, was issued in a numbered run of 100 copies. In 1987, Maniac replaced the earlier vocalist, whom Øystein Aarseth subsequently described as a former session singer despite his appearance on both the demo and the band’s first proper release. That release, Deathcrush, appeared in a run of 1,000 copies on the band’s own Posercorpse Music label and sold out fairly quickly.

After Deathcrush came out, the band changed vocalists again: Dead, previously the distinctive singer of the Stockholm cult act Morbid, joined Mayhem and moved to Oslo. Mayhem also acquired a new drummer, Jan Axel Blomberg, known as Hellhammer. The account calls him one of the underground’s most talented musicians. His arrival belongs to a moment of increasing recognition: Aarseth held considerable influence among disaffected young listeners, and Mayhem was regarded as the most extreme band in an otherwise quiet, conservative country. Yet reputation and sales did not bring financial security. Despite the mini-LP’s brisk sales and Mayhem’s growing notoriety, its members remained very poor.

Church Arson and National Heritage

In an interview, Hellhammer rejected the church burnings and said he had opposed them from the beginning. But his stated alternative complicates any reading of that opposition as a rejection of arson itself. He proposed that those responsible should instead attack mosques or foreign Hindu and Islamic religious sites, and even referred to places with people inside them. The distinction he drew was therefore not a consistent defense of religious buildings or their congregations. His remarks set the destruction of old Norwegian artworks against the proposed targeting of non-Norwegian religious sites, placing national heritage at the center of his objection.

That contrast matters in the wider account of the Norwegian scene. The book describes the church fires as a continuing phenomenon, even after the 1994 trials reduced their public visibility; in a 1995 interview, Varg Vikernes claimed that many fires had occurred the previous year and that they continued. Hellhammer’s testimony does not establish his involvement in any arson. It does, however, show that denunciation of the fires could coexist with an openly hostile suggestion of violence against other religious communities. His position is best understood through that contradiction rather than reduced to a simple anti-arson stance.

Aarseth, Vikernes, and the Murder

Hellhammer’s interview also addresses the killing of Mayhem guitarist Øystein Aarseth, known as Euronymous. Asked whether the guitarist in Mayhem had been directly involved, he said that Varg Vikernes and Snorre Westvold Ruch, referred to in the interview as Blackthorn, had been living in Bergen, roughly a seven-hour drive from Oslo. He said the killing had been planned and described Blackthorn as part of it, while distinguishing his role from that of the person who stabbed Aarseth: Blackthorn, according to Hellhammer, watched rather than carrying out the stabbing.

The interviewer then asked whether Hellhammer himself sounded upset. He said that he was not. That answer gives the testimony a strikingly detached tone, though the evidence does not explain his emotional response beyond the brief exchange. Hellhammer also described having liked Aarseth, while identifying Aarseth’s communism as an offense to him. In his account, Aarseth had treated communism as an extreme position, partly because of what he associated with Soviet Russia, but later rejected it and claimed to be a fascist. Hellhammer expressed uncertainty about that later claim and returned instead to the fact that Aarseth had been a communist. Affection and ideological disapproval thus appear together in his recollection, without resolving into either loyalty or mourning.

Race, Skinheads, and Political Affinity

Hellhammer’s 1994 interview contains explicit racial exclusion. He characterized Black Metal as belonging to white people and affirmed that this was a general view. The book places such remarks beside discussion of links between Black Metal and fascistic youth genres, including skinhead music, whose cultures it associates with violence, slogans, and antisocial conduct. It attributes associations with radical skinheads through the Norwegian Heathen Front project to Vikernes; Hellhammer’s part in this comparison was to acknowledge that the two audiences overlapped to a limited extent.

He said he knew many skinheads and got along with them personally. He also said that they disliked Satanism and that he shared this objection because he was not a Satanist. Asked about immigration, he called it a problem in Norway, though less severe than in Sweden, and said that immigration was also reaching Norway. His account of the skinheads’ interest in Black Metal placed politics ahead of musical enthusiasm: he described their attraction as principally political rather than musical. Taken together, these statements distinguish personal sociability from shared taste while making clear that Hellhammer understood the relationship in ideological terms.

Significance in the Scene

Hellhammer’s place in the narrative rests on two different kinds of evidence. The early band history records a concrete musical role: he became Mayhem’s drummer as its small-run releases and reputation were drawing greater attention, even while its members remained impoverished. The interviews, by contrast, preserve his judgments about violence, national heritage, race, religion, and political association. They do not make him responsible for the actions he discusses, nor do they establish that he participated in the arsons or Aarseth’s murder. They do show how a musician identified with an extreme underground scene could oppose the destruction of Norwegian churches while proposing other targets, speak of personal closeness without political agreement, and describe Black Metal as both a musical culture and a racially bounded one. The resulting portrait is not a single doctrine but a series of tensions laid bare in his own testimony.