Heavenshore, a converted garage in Stockholm, February 1988. Three records are being worked on in the same room and only one of them will reach a shop that year. A project filed under the name Valhalla is abandoned where it stands. A saga cycle recorded alongside it goes into a cupboard and stays there for seven years. The third set of tapes is Blood Fire Death, and on it the man who had spent four years building the coldest guitar sound in Europe turned his back on the whole apparatus and rode north instead.
The claim usually made for the album is that viking metal begins here. The claim is half true, and the half that is false is the more interesting one. What Bathory put on tape in that garage is not a viking metal record. It is a black metal record with three enormous holes cut in it, and through those holes an entire subgenre walked in over the following decade. The instrument being abandoned had been built by the same hands, in the same room, across the three albums covered among the bands that came before Norway.
One session, three albums, one release
The credits are short and half of them are fiction. Quorthon took guitars, vocals, percussion and effects, engineered and mixed the thing, and shared the production with his father Stig Borje Forsberg, who ran the label. A bass player credited as Kothaar and a drummer credited as Vvornth appear on the sleeve and have never been identified by anybody, before or since. Quorthon said in 2003 that he thought he had played the bass himself on the album that followed this one, which tells you roughly how much weight the credits on a Bathory sleeve are built to carry.
Under One Flag, the extreme wing of the British independent Music for Nations that Martin Hooker had started in 1983, put the record into shops on 17 October 1988. Black Mark handled Scandinavia and Germany and Kraze took the United States. Three territories for an album made by one man, two ghosts and a father with a pressing plant on the telephone is the widest distribution anything from this corner of the music had yet been given.
Two records bolted together at the spine
Play it through once and the seam is impossible to miss. Five of the nine tracks are the last of the old band, played at speed, built out of struck chords, closer to the German thrash of the period than to anything a Norwegian teenager would attempt three years later. "Pace 'Till Death" runs three minutes and thirty nine seconds. "Holocaust" runs three twenty five. Neither is remotely interested in atmosphere and both are extremely good at the other thing, which is to arrive, do the damage and leave before anybody thinks to object.
| # | Track | Length | Which record it belongs to |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Oden's Ride Over Nordland | 2:59 | The new one, and a weather report rather than a song |
| 2 | A Fine Day to Die | 8:35 | The new one |
| 3 | The Golden Walls of Heaven | 5:22 | The old one |
| 4 | Pace 'Till Death | 3:39 | The old one |
| 5 | Holocaust | 3:25 | The old one |
| 6 | For All Those Who Died | 4:57 | The old one |
| 7 | Dies Irae | 5:11 | The old one |
| 8 | Blood Fire Death | 10:28 | The new one |
| 9 | Outro | 0:58 | Neither |
The first side is where the argument lives. "Oden's Ride Over Nordland" is not a song. It is two minutes and fifty nine seconds of storm, hooves and a choral drone laid over the top, and its only function is to make the listener wait. Nobody in this music had opened an album that way before. Then "A Fine Day to Die" spends its first three minutes refusing to begin, with an acoustic figure and a build that a thrash band of 1988 would have cut in the mix, and when the tempo finally lands it does not accelerate so much as widen. Rolling Stone put it seventy sixth among the greatest metal songs in 2023. The title track closes the record at ten minutes and twenty eight seconds, a length that was absurd for this music in 1988 and has been standard equipment in it ever since.
The tempo does not accelerate. It widens, and a music that had only ever owned a cellar was handed a horizon.
A painting from 1872 doing the work of a manifesto
The sleeve did as much work as the songs and possibly more. It reproduces Asgardsreien, painted by the Norwegian artist Peter Nicolai Arbo in 1872, a canvas of 166 by 240 centimetres now held by the National Museum in Oslo, showing the wild hunt crossing a night sky on black horses with Thor at the head of it and the hammer raised. Arbo built the composition out of a poem by Johan Sebastian Welhaven. A nineteenth century national romantic painting had never been anywhere near a record of this kind, and putting one there settled an argument about what this music was allowed to look like. Not a goat, not a pentagram, not four young men photographed in spikes, but a museum piece about a myth belonging to the people who were buying the album.
Through the nightly air stampedes a train of frothing black horses.
Johan Sebastian Welhaven, Asgaardsreien
Everything downstream of that sleeve is visible on a shelf. The wild hunt became a standing motif in metal and in this genre in particular, the museum canvas became a normal thing to license, and the northern landscape replaced the crypt as the default setting. Quorthon, who had spent the previous four years explaining that his Satanism was an attack on the church rather than a faith, had found a subject that did the same work without the horror properties.
What was actually inherited, and by whom
The subgenre this album is said to have founded is a subject rather than a sound, which is why the founding claim is so slippery. Nothing here is musically unprecedented: acoustic passages, choral voices, opened tempos and long form all existed elsewhere in metal by 1988. What was new was aiming every one of them at Norse myth at once, on a record made by a band the extreme underground took seriously, with a painting on the front that said the same thing before a note had played.
Hammerheart, out in 1990, is the album that carries the idea across a full running time, and Twilight of the Gods followed in 1991. What came after is a lineage anyone can hear on the shelf. Enslaved put out Hordanes Land in 1993 and Vikingligr Veldi in February 1994, made by musicians of fifteen and seventeen who had grown up on these records. Einherjer reached Dragons of the North in 1996. Amon Amarth reached Once Sent from the Golden Hall in 1998 and then took the subject to arenas Quorthon never saw. Helheim, Falkenbach, Thyrfing and Moonsorrow all run back through the same two albums.
The verdict
It is not the first viking metal album and it is not trying to be one. It is the record on which the man who built the black metal guitar sound announced that he had finished with it, and the announcement occupies three tracks out of nine while the other five carry on doing what the band had always done. That divided quality is exactly why it lasts. The fully committed viking record arrived two years later and is the better statement of the idea. This is the better album, because the old band and the new one are audible on the same tape arguing with each other, and neither of them wins.
Each founder handed the next generation one thing and one thing only. Out of this converted garage in Sweden came the tone, the cold and eventually the north itself. Out of Copenhagen came something else entirely, an occult vocabulary handled with a straight face and a stagecraft nobody in Norway would ever admit to copying, which is the subject of mercyful Fate, King Diamond and the Theatrical Line.
