cahlen/black-metal-art-sdxl-lora

Black Metal Art LoRA — SDXL Style LoRA for Black Metal Visual Art

A LoRA fine-tune of SDXL 1.0 trained on black metal album covers, band logos, and zine art. Generates high-contrast dark art in the visual language of black metal: fog-drenched forests, burning churches, corpse paint portraits, illegible spiky logos, frozen mountain landscapes, and occult imagery — the raw, monochrome aesthetic from the early Norwegian scene through modern atmospheric and DSBM.

Trigger word: black-metal-art

Example Generations

Landscapes & Scenes

Portraits & Figures

Logos & Typography

Black metal logos are intentionally illegible — garbled, spiky text output is a feature, not a bug. Higher LoRA scales (0.7–0.8) produce more authentic logo aesthetics.

Album Cover Compositions

LoRA Scale Comparison

The same prompt ("dark forest, fog, dead trees") at different LoRA scales:

Training Progression

The same prompt at different training checkpoints (forest scene, LoRA scale 0.7):

Usage

With Diffusers

import torch
from diffusers import StableDiffusionXLPipeline

pipe = StableDiffusionXLPipeline.from_pretrained(
    "stabilityai/stable-diffusion-xl-base-1.0",
    torch_dtype=torch.float16,
    variant="fp16",
)
pipe.load_lora_weights("cahlen/black-metal-art-sdxl-lora")
pipe.set_adapters(["default_0"], adapter_weights=[0.7])
pipe.to("cuda")

image = pipe(
    prompt="black-metal-art, dark forest, fog, dead trees, high contrast, monochrome",
    negative_prompt="blurry, photorealistic, photo, smooth gradients, 3d render, watermark, clean, modern, digital",
    width=1024,
    height=1024,
    num_inference_steps=30,
    guidance_scale=7.5,
).images[0]

image.save("black_metal_art.png")

With ComfyUI / A1111

Load pytorch_lora_weights.safetensors as a standard SDXL LoRA. Use trigger word black-metal-art in your prompt.

Recommended Settings

LoRA Scale Guide

Text & Logo Generation

Unlike most LoRAs, garbled text is welcome with this model. Black metal band logos are famously illegible — the spiky, branch-like letterforms that SDXL generates naturally match the genre aesthetic. For logo generation, use higher LoRA scales (0.7–0.8) and prompts like:

• —black-metal-art, illegible spiky band logo, branches and thorns
• —black-metal-art, band logo, flames, inverted cross, black background

Prompt Tips

• —Always start with the trigger word: black-metal-art
• —Landscape prompts work great: forests, mountains, frozen lakes, graveyards, ruins
• —Monochrome keywords reinforce the style: high contrast, monochrome, black and white
• —Atmospheric keywords: fog, mist, bleak, desolation, frozen, winter
• —Best subjects: dark forests, burning churches, corpse paint, mountains, wolves, ravens, skulls, occult symbols, band logos
• —Album cover format: Use 1024x1024 square resolution

Training Details

Dataset

Why SDXL over FLUX

SDXL 1.0 (3.5B parameters) was chosen over FLUX (12B+) because FLUX's strong photorealistic prior overwhelms rank-32 style LoRAs. SDXL's smaller parameter count is more amenable to specialized art styles at practical LoRA ranks.

Style Reference

This LoRA captures the visual language of black metal art:

• —High-contrast monochrome — dark, raw, uncompromising
• —Norwegian black metal scene — the iconic aesthetic of Mayhem, Burzum, Darkthrone, Emperor
• —Frozen landscapes — snow-covered forests, mountains, desolate winter scenes
• —Burning churches — the infamous visual motif of early Norwegian black metal
• —Corpse paint — the theatrical black and white face paint
• —Illegible logos — spiky, branch-like letterforms, intentionally unreadable
• —Occult imagery — pentagrams, inverted crosses, goat heads, ritual scenes
• —Album cover compositions — wolves, ravens, skulls, ancient ruins

License

This LoRA inherits the CreativeML OpenRAIL-M license from the SDXL base model.

Acknowledgments

Training data sourced from public digital archives (MusicBrainz / Cover Art Archive, Internet Archive). This LoRA is a tribute to the visual art tradition of black metal and the artists who created this iconic aesthetic.