Arcturus

Featuring (at various times) members from bands such as Mayhem, Ulver, Emperor, and Dimmu Borgir, it's no wonder that Arcturus was once tabbed a black metal supergroup, though their recordings suggested they were far more than that. Aspera Hiems Symfonia, their 1996 debut full-length album, is still regarded as a classic symphonic black metal album, but it's the followup, La Masquerade Infernale, a truly unique, progressive, avant-garde art metal affair, that defined what this band was all about. Mixing carnivalesque narration-styled vocals and a host of odd influences, Masquerade set the bar for broadening the boundaries of what used to be a rather limiting genre. Their final two albums (not including the remix album Disguised Masters), combined the experimentalism of Masquerade with a more traditional symphonic black metal base, yet these albums, too, showed that the band was quite willing to take chances. Given that most of the guys had other band commitments, it's not too surprising that eventually it had to come to an end, the members announcing in April 2007 that they had no more time to commit to Arcturus.

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Discography

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