Three albums in two years, sold as a trilogy, and the one in the middle has no electric guitar on it, no distortion, no shriek and no aggression of any kind. Ulver recorded Kveldssanger at Endless Lydstudio in Oslo across the summer and autumn of 1995 with acoustic guitars, cello, flutes and stacked clean voices, and Head Not Found released it in March 1996 between Bergtatt and Nattens Madrigal. A black metal band at the exact peak of the second wave put out a record of chamber folk and called it part of the same body of work.
That is the clearest statement of what this branch is for. It has two halves and they are worth separating, because the word medieval and the word folk are doing different jobs.
Two different claims
Folk black metal takes a living regional tradition, its instruments, its tunings and its tunes, and writes black metal around it. The material is inherited, the players usually grew up hearing it, and the point is continuity. Medieval black metal makes a stranger claim: that the melodic writing of European music before roughly 1500, its modes, its parallel motion and its refusal of the tonic chord the rest of Western music is built on, is closer to what black metal already does than anything in modern harmony. One reaches back through a family. The other reaches back through a library.
Neither of them is the Norse material dealt with elsewhere in this family, which is a matter of narrative and imagery rather than of melodic method, and neither is the branch that removed the instruments entirely. The distinction matters because it decides what you are listening for. Where all of them sit in relation to each other is set out in the chapter this belongs to.
It is worth being concrete about the melodic claim, because it is usually left as a gesture. Most Western music since the seventeenth century is organised around a home chord that the harmony leaves and then returns to, and the pleasure of it is the return. Music written before that convention hardened works differently: a line moves through a scale with a fixed final note but no chord underneath demanding resolution, voices move in parallel fourths and fifths rather than in thirds and sixths, and the whole thing hangs rather than arrives. Black metal reached adjacent territory from the other end, by playing one riff for six minutes and refusing to resolve it, without having read a word about any of this. The medieval bands simply noticed.
The record with nothing on it
Kristoffer Rygg has said that very little of Kveldssanger existed before the sessions began and that the studio itself was being used as an instrument, which explains the shape of it: short pieces, no development, the same handful of modal figures turned over and left. Erik Olivier Lancelot played the flutes and what percussion there is. AllMusic gave it four stars out of five. It is not black metal by any definition anybody has proposed, and it has been essential listening inside the genre for thirty years, which tells you something about how thin the line between the two really is.
Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote the droghte of Marche hath perced to the roote.
Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales
Germany builds a label around it
The most consistent body of work in the acoustic half came out of Germany. Empyrium, put together in 1994 by Markus Stock, who records as Ulf Theodor Schwadorf, and Andreas Bach, started in doom and folk metal with harsh and operatic voices over slow guitars and moved steadily toward acoustic guitars, violins, cellos and flutes, until by the end of the decade the metal had almost entirely left the recordings. They stopped after Weiland in 2002, with Stock saying they had been working the same seam since 1994 and were finished with it, then returned in 2010 and have kept going through The Turn of the Tides in 2014 and Über den Sternen in 2021. Prophecy Productions carried almost all of it and built a roster and an aesthetic around that one idea.
One branch reaches back through a family. The other reaches back through a library.
Medieval means the modes, not the costume
The strictest version of the medieval claim is being made in Minneapolis, which is exactly where nobody would look for it. Obsequiae, formed in 2007 around Tanner Anderson on voice, guitar and bass, with Andrew Della Cagna on drums from 2011, write melodic black metal whose lines are constructed on medieval principles rather than decorated with medieval imagery, and the records are broken up by solo harp pieces played by Vicente La Camera Mariño from period repertoire. Suspended in the Brume of Eos came in 2011, Aria of Vernal Tombs in 2015 and The Palms of Sorrowed Kings in 2019, across Bindrune and 20 Buck Spin, and the reviews came from places that do not usually cover this music at all.
What makes it work is that the harp is not an interlude bolted on for atmosphere. The metal tracks use the same melodic material the harp pieces use, so the guitar lines move in the same way, in parallel intervals, circling without resolving, and the join between the two halves of the record is invisible. That is a harder thing to do than putting a tin whistle over a blast beat, and it is why almost nobody else has managed it.
Folk means the tradition you were raised in
The other half is older and more crowded. Cruachan were assembled in Dublin in 1992 by Keith Fay, who had heard what Skyclad were doing with fiddles and decided the same trick would work with Irish material, and Tuatha na Gael arrived in 1995 on a small label after the band turned down a Century Media contract that would have handed the label control of their direction. Bodhrán, tin whistle and bouzouki, played properly, against black metal guitars.
The American answer arrived twenty years later and is the strongest thing the branch has produced this century. Panopticon began in Louisville in 2007 as Austin Lunn alone, writing everything and playing everything, and Kentucky in 2012 and Roads to the North in 2014 put banjo, fiddle and bells into black metal that is genuinely about the place it comes from, coal, water, land and the people who lost all three. It works for the same reason the Irish records work and for the same reason the medieval ones do: the folk material is load bearing rather than ornamental.
Between those two ends sit the bands who took Norwegian folk melody itself as raw material rather than the imagery around it. In the Woods... built HEart of the Ages in 1995 out of long modal passages and clean singing with more in common with a hymn than with a shout, and a run of German and British bands has worked the same ground since with local tunes. None of it needs a costume to function, which is the point of the branch and the thing most often missed about it.
Where it goes wrong
The failure mode of this branch is costume, and there is a great deal of it. A flute over an otherwise unchanged black metal song is not folk black metal, a lute sample is not a medieval mode, and a sleeve painted to look like an illuminated manuscript proves nothing about the writing underneath. The test is whether the traditional material changes what the guitars are doing. If you can lift the folk instruments out and the song is unaffected, they were never in it.
Done properly, this is the warmest music in the genre and the least interested in menace, which is precisely why it survives repeated listening better than most of the family. It sits at the opposite end of the equipment argument from industrial Black Metal, and the next border worth walking is the one with the slowest genre of all, in black Metal vs Doom Metal.
