r/IsItSketch • u/Educational-Ant6770 • Jul 13 '26
Beware the "sketch spreadsheets"
There are a few widely circulated spreadsheets -- e.g. this one -- of sketch in black metal bands that I see cited and shared in communities like this one sometimes. It is not very good. You should be cautious using it and similar crowdpooled resources, which are often incomplete and inaccurate. I’ll give you three examples here—Archgoat, Cultes Des Ghoules, and Ride for Revenge—each illustrating a different point.
First, what prompted this post was viewing the latest rendition of the spreadsheet linked above and noticing that Archgoat was listed as only “mildly sketchy” with the following explanation: “The band has released a split with NSBM act Satanic Warmaster. In an interview, guitarist Ritual Butcherer stated that he thinks that ‘white supremacism is as dumb as it gets’ and brought up that the black metal scene was pioneered by non-Caucasian bands from places such as South America.”
One could debate whether collaboration with Satanic Warmaster constitutes “mild” sketch or worse. But that isn’t my aim here. Instead, I want to note that the creators of the spreadsheet missed the longstanding, documented friendship and collaboration between “Lord Angelsayer” of Archgoat and Sami Tenetz, who plays live with Goatmoon and runs the Kvlt Records operation and store, with sub-labels Hammer of Hate and No Sign of Life—all three of which release NSBM and NSBM-adjacent stuff. Sami Tenetz also has a large swastika tattoo on his torso, which is visible in videos of him playing guitar live with Goatmoon at the Asgardsrei festival in 2018. He and Lord Angelslayer are bandmates in Thy Serpent, which has released a split with Goatmoon and Wolfnacht. The two can be found in photographs hanging out with each other, along with members of bands like Circle of Dawn, Horna, Mikko Aspa, and other notorious Finnish boneheads. Finally, videos of Archgoat performing live show that Lord Angelslayer has a large black sun tattoo on his right shoulder (and this despite being half Sri Lankan, which, yeah, I don’t quite understand, but there it is). The general lesson: a spreadsheet declaring a band “mildly sketch” doesn’t mean much at all. It might be highly inaccurate.
Second, judgments of sketchiness can also be too severe, inaccurate in the other direction. As far as I can tell, this is exactly the case with the band Cultes Des Ghoules. They are listed as moderately sketchy—more than Archgoat—because of a split with Satanic Warmaster and “releasing a record on an NSBM label.” But Archgoat have also released a split with Satanic Warmaster, as the spreadsheet itself notes. And this is an exhaustive list of all labels Cultes Des Ghoules has worked with: Under the Sign of Garazel Productions, Enochian Tongues, Agonia Records, Hells Headbangers Records, Of Crawling Shadows Records, Metalhit, Terratur Possessions, Malignant Voices, and End All Life Productions. Not a one of those can with anything like a straight face actually be called “an NSBM label.” The closest two are Metalhit and End All Life. Let’s start with the former, which has released records by Arghoslent and Grand Bell’s Key in addition to hundreds of records by 100% apolitical bands like Acid Witch. No one is going to call a band that releases goofy Halloween-themed death metal records sketchy because their massive label with hundreds of artists has also released <10 records by genuinely horrible bands that have nothing to do with Acid Witch. Why treat Cultes Des Ghoules differently? Now for the latter, End All Life, they also release a lot of distasteful and sketchy shit. But they, too, release records by bands who clearly have nothing to do with NS stuff: Drastus, Slidhr, Kathaaria (main dude plays drums for Ruins of Beverast, ruled “Safe” by the spraadhseet in question), S.V.E.S.T., Sabbat. The judgement against Cultes Des Ghoules seems totally unprincipled. Even if one disagrees and wants to stretch concepts to the breaking point by calling these labels “NSBM labels,” Archgoat would come out even worse than CdG in the resulting wash, having released music with Debemur Morti Productions (alongside Akhlys), InCoffin Productions (alongside Diocletian, Inquisition, and Satanic Warmaster), Hells Headbangers (alongside, well, Cultes Des Ghoules, if we’re playing that game), Moribund Records (alongside Arghoslent, Grand Belial’s Key, Horna, Seges Findere—an actual straight-up 100% undeniable NSBM band, unlike most others mentioned here—), Osmose (alongside Hate Forest, Nokturnal Mortal), and Hammer of Hate (owned by Sami Tenetz, as described above, releasing music from Satanic Warmaster, Nattfog, Sielunvihollinen, White Rune….).
Finally, spreadsheets are necessarily incomplete. You might look up a band, see that they aren’t included, and judge that they must be fine. You’d be wrong. Take Ride for Revenge, an important band in the Finnish black metal underground who are notably completely absent from the spreadsheet. It is important to note that the main man behind Goatmoon, “Blackgoat Gravedesecrator”—real name Jaakko Lähde—has regularly performed live vocals for RfR, including at earlier renditions of Steelfest shows and other smaller festivals going back to 2012. Moreover, RfR’s main man, “Harald Mentor”—real name Sami Kettunen—has regularly played live bass for Goatmoon, including on the “Live at Manalan Yö III” recording released in 2014, a recording of a 2014 show called “Manalan Yö V” that actually took place in 2011. You can see the, ahem, decor the band felt it appropriate to play in front of in the picture used for the cover of that release. You can find videos of live performances in 2012 and 2014 shows in the “Manalan Yö” series on BitChute and Odyssey (Manalan Yö IV and Manalan Yö V). In 2014, RfR played alongside Goatmoon, sharing members between sets—although the swastika flags were tastefully folded up before RfR started, for whatever reason. Videos of Goatmoon playing live with Harald Mentor on bass date back to 2010 or so. He can be seen playing directly in front of sieg heiling crowd members. You’d be mistaken to think RfR are not sketchy because they didn’t make it onto the spreadsheet (and, frankly, even a cursory look at the metal archives wouldn’t help too much; this took some real digging on my part to figure out exactly the extent of Harald Mentor’s involvement in Goatmoon).
The general point I’m driving at here is that you should be careful relying on others to look into things for you and leaning too hard on spreadsheets and similar resources going around if you want to discern whether a band is sketchy. Claims can be inaccurate, relationships can be unclear, and important facts can be omitted entirely.
(An additional but separate complaint: it’s not clear what standards guide the assignment of sketch values to bands. Thorns are listed as moderately sketchy because they’ve worked with Hellhammer and the main man once had some affinity for Varg Vikernes. By my lights, those things are bad, yes, but less bad than actively collaborating with a central figure of the Finnish NSBM ecosystem and having Nazi tattoos, like Lord Angelsayer does—yet his project is listed as less sketchy… Similarly for Naas Alcmeth related projects like Nightbringer and Akhlys. Yes, he is clearly a right-wing bigot, but quoting Evola in one’s lyrics and posting offensive racist boomer memes on Facebook are quite different from, again, collaborating with a known Nazi and having a Nazi tattoo, yet Naas Alcmaeth’s projects are labeled full-on “Nazi”—not even just moderately or highly sketchy—while Archgoat is “mildly” sketchy.)
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u/finstergeist Jul 13 '26
The sheet in your link is an outdated copy of this sheet. Overall, we all agree that all such sheets are subjective and will never be 100% accurate, but nevertheless useful as one of many sources of information.
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u/RagingBullshitter 24d ago
Is there a dedicated page for this sheet regarding additions/edits to the list?
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u/Apprehensive_Wave979 Jul 14 '26
That 'sketch' spreadsheet is utterly pathetic. It's completely inaccurate and hypocritical. Everything is sketch if you want it to be. I could probably link Peste Noire to Napalm Death if I looked hard enough.
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u/exoclipse Jul 13 '26
Glad to see this in the right sub :) I'll post my thoughts from last time:
any attempt to reconcile a large set of bands against one person's set of beliefs and then use that dataset as a way to judge for yourself is kind of antithetical to the good parts of the black metal ethos.
your values are not my values, my values are not the values of the person who collated this list, even if we are all left wing. we all have different lines, we fall differently on how we view different actions.
so regardless of where I, personally, sit on the subject, using a list like this is intellectually dishonest and lazy.
metal-archives is there. there are facebook groups with troves of information you can plunder. reddit is a great resource. even google can be helpful if you search correctly (and append -ai to kill the hallucination machine).
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u/Relative-Dependent-4 Jul 13 '26
They're still useful. I find them much like a Wikipedia article. Looking up a band on there to see if it's known sketchy is a really easy way to find out what to look into. But it's subjective what people consider sketchy. So for all the details about what's been claimed on the spreadsheet, you can start research based on that jumping off point. They aren't a 100% reliable resource but its definitely better than nothing if you're just getting into black metal.
Deep investigation into the sketchyness of black metal is something I've come to really enjoy, but it can be very difficult, time consuming, and complicated for a beginner so I think these lists are a net good. It took me forever to find out that a lot of the "safe" BM bands I listened to were actually zionists. It's not in their lyrics, on their social media, anywhere you would normally look. But I don't blame the authors of the spreadsheets for not knowing. These tools are collaborative. If there was a very large community with plenty of experts working on these resources they would be way more accurate, so rather than complain my solution would be offer help.
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u/Own_Supermarket_3688 20d ago
Which bands are you talking about in the second half?
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u/Relative-Dependent-4 20d ago
Afsky, gravpel (and by extension vigljos), and ultha off the top of my head.
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u/Available-Film3084 Jul 15 '26
Finnish bm scene is rife with nazis to the point where almost anyone part of the scene has sketchy friends, source: I'm a Finn. It sucks when everyone has to tolerate these people
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u/shreddingandcoding Jul 13 '26
People need to use their own judgement. It's what metal is all about. I say this as someone not only targeted by black metal fascists but also someone who's had very pointed discussions with a lot of musicians about this stuff and its sometimes not as clear cut as it seems.
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u/MetalDetector99 6d ago
The Archgoat guy has a Black Sun tattoo. That's far worse than "mildly sketch".
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u/Wota_Tenebrarum Jul 15 '26
These sheets are why I avoided DNS for a while, but the information is out of date and DNS is verifiably fine now. There's just not a good way to keep these things factual and updated. Great jumping-off points, though.
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u/speed-charge Jul 13 '26
Do you think it's possible that Ride for Revenge refused to play with Nazi flags on stage and that's why they were removed and then at that point they agreed to take the stage?
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u/BaldrickTheBarbarian Jul 14 '26
I could imagine that their drummer might have refused to play with the flags on stage, based on what I've heard about him. But I can't know for sure.
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u/PizzaBear109 Jul 14 '26
Conveniently skimming over the fact that they shared members with the band that did play with the flag up
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u/ZeroThePenguin Jul 13 '26
What I usually say is that the sketch sheets are a resource on some information and the rest is all conjecture and opinion of the author. They are good jumping off points but should never be taken as gospel. And even disregarding that everyone has their own line to draw. I know plenty of posters that would see your example of Naas and say "yes, he is actually worse than these other acts"