Mayhem

It’s one thing to make a necklace with pieces of a bandmate’s skull; it’s another thing to eat pieces of that same bandmate’s brain. That is what’s said to have happened back in the day with Mayhem, a Norwegian black-metal band with as macabre a backstory as could ever be imagined. As the story goes—much surrounding the lore of black metal is best taken as stories, difficult to verify but rich nonetheless—after Mayhem’s singer committed suicide with a shotgun in 1991, bandmate Euronymous cooked and ate part of his brain. Bits of brain were easy to come by, as evidenced by the photo of the crime scene that Mayhem used as an album cover shortly after. It’s unclear if the band has mellowed out over the course of some recent lineup changes, but compared to the band’s former antics, a 2009 arrest for allegedly destroying a Dutch hotel room seems, well, tame.

Updated 10/26/2011