The definition of Dark metal is a metal sub-genre drawing influences from doom metal, gothic metal, black metal and death metal. The term is derived from German band Bethlehem’s 1994 debut album Dark Metal and spread during the late 1990s due to bands starting to play music that couldn’t be clearly attributed to any of the aforementioned genres nor their specific subcultures. According to NME, dark metal “translates broadly as extreme metal with plenty of gloomy gothic-isms and ambient sounds.” As especially the black metal subculture has a rigid codex of “trueness”, it tends to use the dark metal term for bands that moved too far from the musical and/or ideological ideals of black metal or only partially drawing influences from black metal, like Cradle of Filth, later Rotting Christ “having both gothic and of course heavy metal elements tied up all together” or later Dimmu Borgir. As dark metal is not clearly defined ideologically and lyrically, there is no existing dark metal scene identity, but a loose conglomerate of bands.