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Trigger warning: This episode discusses difficult topics including suicide, homicide, and other forms of trauma.  Please listen with caution.

What comes to mind when you think of "black metal" music? Face paint, screams laced with hate, rage, aggression. Most metalheads might talk a big game about Satan, death, and destruction, but in reality are often mild-mannered accountants or kindergarten teachers who can’t even stand the sight of blood. But what if the darkness wasn’t just for show? What if the chaos, the obsession with death, and the destruction wasn’t a stage persona but a way of life (and death)?

This was the grim reality for Mayhem, a Norwegian black metal band formed just outside Oslo in 1984, widely regarded as the pioneers of the Norwegian black metal scene. Their infamy goes far beyond the music they created or the genre they helped define—it’s rooted in the pure, unrelenting chaos, violence, and nihilism they embodied. Onstage, offstage, and in the very depths of their existence, they lived what many would only dare to perform: satanic worship, neo-Nazism, arson, cannibalism, suicide, and murder. As the band name suggests, this case is absolute mayhem.

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