Viking Metal

Sagas at marching pace

The heaviest saga ever shouted over distorted guitars, viking metal, tore the blizzard of blast beats out of the black metal it grew from and put slow, heavy riffing in its place, raising anthemic choruses, laying keyboards on for atmosphere and bringing in folk instruments wherever they fit, with clean singing and black metal screams taking turns inside the same song. The gods here are older. Production cleaned up to let the choirs and acoustic guitars through, and the lyrics settled on Odin, on Thor and his hammer, on mead and on the sagas.

Of all the labels in heavy metal, viking metal defines itself least by a riff and most by a subject, which is why some treat it as a theme that crosses genres rather than a genre of its own. The North lives in the band names, the album titles, the sleeves and above all the lyrics. The same hull gets hauled overland from black metal to folk to death metal, like a longship dragged across the portage between two rivers, and it keeps its dragon figurehead the whole way. That is the dividing line.

The neighbours share the theme but not the fence. Pagan metal casts its net over every old religion and leans harder on folk instruments, folk metal keeps the tunes and can take or leave the gods, and viking metal holds to the North and its sea. Some bands refuse to choose.

Viking metal, three hulls

Launched from Sweden and rowed hardest along the fjords of western Norway, the map is a fleet of three hulls sailing under one banner: the black metal hull of Enslaved, Einherjer, Windir, Helheim and Kampfar, the folk hull of Månegarm, Týr in the Faroe Islands and Skálmöld in Iceland, and the death metal hull of Amon Amarth and Unleashed. Germany has Falkenbach. Finland has Moonsorrow, who sit in viking, pagan and folk metal at once and cannot be evicted from any of the three.

Amon Amarth are the usual quarrel on any list of viking metal bands. The Swedes play melodic death metal with Norse lyrics, which puts them on the map by subject and off it by sound, and Unleashed took up the same imagery from the death metal side. The Norwegian one-off Storm, built in the mid nineties by Fenriz of Darkthrone, Satyr of Satyricon and the singer Kari Rueslåtten, came at it from the other direction, hammering traditional Norwegian folk songs into metal. The band split soon after its only album.

Six ships to board

Six viking metal albums, from a Stockholm studio in 1989 to the Billboard 200 in 2008. Row in order.

• Bathory Hammerheart Noise, 1990

  Quorthon on vocals, guitars and keyboards, "One Rode to Asa Bay" on the Christianisation of Scandinavia, and Frank Dicksee's painting The Funeral of a Viking on the sleeve.

• Enslaved Frost Osmose, 1994

  Recorded at Grieghallen in Bergen, Norse myth in every title, and Trym Torson's last album before he left to drum for Emperor.

• Storm Nordavind Moonfog, 1995

  Fenriz, Satyr and Kari Rueslåtten on one album only, original songs set beside metal versions of traditional Norwegian folk songs.

• Einherjer Dragons of the North Napalm, 1996

  The debut, recorded at Grieghallen in May and June 1996, Norse legend set to folk melodies and the weight of symphonic black metal.

• Windir Arntor Head Not Found, 1999

  Valfar sang every word in the Sognamål dialect and played guitars, bass, synthesiser and accordion over black metal, folk and a stray polka.

• Amon Amarth Twilight of the Thunder God Metal Blade, 2008

  Thor against the Midgard Serpent in melodic death metal, Apocalyptica on cellos, and the band's first Billboard 200 entry, at number 50.