Back to the Beginning

It’s the late nineties. Maybe the early two-thousands. The exact year doesn’t matter, because the way I remember it, time moved at the speed of a dial-up handshake. I’m sitting at my PC, listening to it connect, hunting for more metal.

There had been mild exposure already. My parents kept a library of new wave and prog rock, and somewhere in those tapes was the first hint that music could be stranger and louder than everybody else listened to. I’d brushed up against some extreme metal too by then. But nothing prepared me for what was about to come through.

I land, somehow, on the Black Mark website. I download a single MP3. It’s called The Rite of Darkness. Bathory.

Everything changes.

I don’t have a better way to put it. There’s a before and there’s an after, and the line between them is that one track loading late at night. After Bathory came Opeth, and between those two bands a whole world cracked open, one half of me wanting the raw, frostbitten, primitive end of extreme metal, the other half wanting the finer, more composed, more devastating version of it. I never had to choose. I just fell in.

The under-underground

People talk about Pakistan’s underground metal scene as if it were one thing. It wasn’t. There was the underground, and then there was the under-underground. No rock bands. No crossover. Extreme metal in Pakistan was always alive, but it lived in pockets. A tape here, a friend-of-a-friend there, a handful of shows in the late nineties that you only knew about if you already knew somebody.

If you were lucky enough to know that somebody, you got handed a different scene entirely. If you weren’t, you might live your whole life in the same city and never know it existed.

What stitched us together was the internet, but not the internet anyone romanticizes now. It was mIRC and DC++. Music was hard to find, so these channels became our record stores, and because we were all in there hunting for the same impossible files at two in the morning, they became something else too: they became where the friendships were made. You came for a Marduk rip and left with people you’d know for twenty years.

What we actually had

We never really had nu-metal, which was at its peak in the late 90s. One or two bands, maybe, and almost no cover bands doing it. But I’ll give it this: for a lot of people, nu-metal was the gateway, the thing that cracked the door before the heavier stuff kicked it open.

And there were cover bands. More cover bands than bands writing their own music. I’m not interested in those here. This dispatch, and the ones that will follow, are about the people who made original music. A smaller, stranger, more heroic list.

The infrastructure that didn’t exist

Here’s the part that’s hard to explain to anyone who came up later. There was no infrastructure. None. You put the shows on yourself. There were no sponsors. The venues had the worst sound imaginable, and somehow that was exactly what made them perfect. Bad PA, blown rooms, no monitors, and a feeling in your chest that nothing this good was ever meant to be heard cleanly.

There was almost no coverage. The press would happily write about cover bands and the rock end of the underground, but the extreme stuff was invisible to them. For a brief moment, we even had a metal show on the radio. Black Sunday — a small miracle that, like most small miracles here, didn’t last.

What we did have were the stores. So many of them, across so many cities, where you could simply walk in and buy a tape of a metal release, and later CDs. I’ve heard the stories, Bathory vinyl sitting on a shelf at a shop on Tariq Road. There were stores selling original merch too. We bought Metallica’s Live Shit box set for Rs1,500 from Music Megastore in Zamzama. There was Ground Zero, where I eventually picked up most of my original extreme metal CDs (yes I bought pretty much everything they had for making copies).

Plenty of bands here got pressed on vinyl, something the rock and pop acts of the eighties and nineties can’t even claim. The metal scene hustled. They never whined about not getting a chance.

Sundays, networks, and the ones who vanished

There were Sundays I spent at Babar Sheikh’s, doing nothing but listening to European and South American thrash. Entire afternoons gone to the gospel of obscure demos. Babar’s network ran deep, and still does. Dusk remains, to this day, Pakistan’s greatest metal export, and Babar’s web of contacts was the dream of every nineties tape trader, the kind of global connection I wish all of us had been able to feel back then.

There were forums where this life lived between shows: the Dusk Horde forum, the Messiah forum, little rooms on the early web where the scene argued and organized and existed.

The same faces kept reappearing. Bands traded musicians constantly, and some of those musicians went on to play with the biggest acts in the country. And for every band that surfaced, others simply faded, recorded real, original music that almost nobody ever got to hear. That’s the quiet tragedy under all of this. So much of it was made. So little of it was heard.

We weren’t saints about it, either. There was pettiness. Fights online and fights at shows. There was gatekeeping, a lot of it. And I’ve come to believe that’s part of why it all fizzled away. It was as much to blame as everyone slowly moving abroad.

Someone had to

Which brings me to the thing I can’t leave out, even in an introduction. By 2008 I’d had enough of watching the scene release nothing but singles, one track here, a demo there, a song traded between friends and then silence. Bands were making whole bodies of work, and the world was only ever hearing a fragment of it, if it heard anything at all. So I started an underground record label. It began, of all places, as a business-management project during my MBA. A spreadsheet exercise that turned into the only real answer I had to a problem I’d watched eat the scene alive.

The idea was simple and a little stubborn: if the records weren’t going to release themselves, and nobody else was going to do it, then someone here had to. Someone had to treat this music as music worth pressing, archiving, and putting a catalogue number on. The label was the first real attempt to stop the work from disappearing. This project is the second. I’ll tell the full story. The bands, the releases, the things that worked and the many that didn’t.

There is no beginning

People ask where the scene started, and the honest answer is that it didn’t, not at any single point you could put a pin in. There’s no clean origin, no first cause. But if I had to choose a candidate, I’d pick two. First was the formation of Dusk. And then I’d point at the Shemhamforash show and let it carry the weight.

The scene arrived in a mad frenzy and then it was gone. And just like thunder and lightning, it was glorious in that short moment in eternity.

This is my attempt to catch some of that light before it fades for good — to set down the real history of Pakistan’s extreme metal underground while the people who lived it are still here to tell it. Not the version that made the papers, because there never was one. The real one. The tapes traded at two in the morning, the bands that never released a single note in public, the nights in rooms with terrible sound that somehow came out perfect. Someone has to write it down before it vanishes the way so much of it already has.

So consider this the first crack of thunder.

Welcome to Third World Thunder.