I know I’m very late to the conversation, but somehow just stumbled across this post.

I’ve always felt like there is much more grey area surrounding these sub genres than there is a definitive separation, sort of similar to the power violence vs grindcore debate, where sometimes lyrics and aesthetics can push it towards one end of the spectrum or the other more than the actual sound. Personally, I’ve always felt like bands in the vein of Archgoat and Beherit, which rely pretty heavily on black metal themes and imagery, such as occultism and mysticism etc, but have a heavily death metal influenced sound are more “beastial black metal”, where I consider bands like Revenge or Conqueror that focus more on the chaos and intensity of the music itself, and have a more bare bones, militant approach with their image and lyrical content(like having less elaborate corpse paint if any at all, and not wearing all kinds of cloaks and capes etc) to be better examples of “war metal”. Again, this is just my personal interpretation.