if the only difference in the category archives is the images, you can work without a custom query.
in this case you could use (as suggested here https://developer.wordpress.org/themes/functionality/pagination/#simple-pagination ):
<div class="nav-previous alignleft"><?php next_posts_link( 'Older posts' ); ?></div>
<div class="nav-next alignright"><?php previous_posts_link( 'Newer posts' ); ?></div>
or any other suggestion from https://developer.wordpress.org/themes/functionality/pagination/
for the image, you need to change the img line in your category.php:
<h2><img src="https://wordpress.stackexchange.com/questions/360490/<?php bloginfo("template_directory'); if( is_category( 'black-metal') ) { echo '/assets/img/black-metal-h2.png" alt="Black Metal"'; } elseif( is_category( 'death-metal') ) { echo '/assets/img/death-metal-h2.png" alt="Death Metal"'; } ?>/></h2>