The renaissance of black holes

The advent of gravitational-wave astronomy sparked a hunt of stellar-mass black holes in the Local Universe. Of special interest are the dormant black holes, which do not emit strongly in X-rays. In this talk, I will discuss the difficulty in finding dormant black holes, highlighting a famous few false alarms of recent years. I will discuss how populations of massive single-lined spectroscopic binaries (SB1) are ideal objects to search for elusive black hole companions. I will present recent discoveries of the first dormant black holes in our Milky Way and the Large Magellanic Cloud. I will conclude by discussing the implications of these discoveries on our understanding of black-hole formation, and prospects of increasing the sample of dormant black holes.