At the Altar of Mictlampa

Native American black metal is an extreme-metal microgenre that fuses the sonic and aesthetic vocabulary of black metal—tremolo‑picked guitars, blast‑beat drumming, harsh vocals, and raw or atmospheric production—with Indigenous North American musical elements, languages, instruments, and cosmologies. Artists in this style often weave hand drums, rattles, Native American flute, powwow‑inspired rhythms, and field recordings (wind, water, fire, birds) into black metal song forms. Lyrically, the genre centers on land, ancestor veneration, resistance to colonialism, survival, and regional mythologies. Visual identities (artwork, photography, stage dress) typically foreground Indigenous symbols and landscapes in place of Euro‑Nordic black metal tropes. The result is a sound that can be simultaneously raw and epic: grim, frostbitten riffing set against heartbeat‑like drum pulses or ceremonial chants, or windswept atmospheres that evoke mountains, forests, and rivers—reframing black metal through a distinctly Native lens.