On 23 April 1990, Noise Records released a metal album with a Victorian oil painting on the front, not one blast beat anywhere inside it, and a single man's voice overdubbed until it sounded like a hall full of people. The painting was Frank Dicksee's The Funeral of a Viking, lent by a municipal art gallery in Manchester. The record was Hammerheart, cut between June and August 1989 at Heavenshore in Stockholm, and it invented a way of writing that half of northern Europe has been working on ever since.
Pagan and Viking black metal is the branch that swapped one mythology for another and had to rebuild the music to carry it. That is the interesting part, and it is the part usually skipped in favour of arguing about horns on helmets.
What the music actually does differently
The changes are structural rather than decorative. Tempos come down to something a body can march to, and the tremolo that defines the rest of the genre gives way to slow riffs voiced in open fourths and fifths, which have no third in them and therefore refuse to sound either happy or sad. Drums stop blasting and start keeping time, often with the toms carrying more of the pattern than the snare. The shriek stays, but a second voice arrives beside it, low and sung in unison and multiplied by overdub into a crowd. Songs run long, in sections, because the material is narrative and a narrative needs somewhere to go. Folk instruments show up where a band can afford them and synthesisers stand in where they cannot.
Put together, that produces music with a completely different physical intent from the second wave. Black metal is written to exclude. This branch writes choruses meant to be sung back in unison by a crowd that does not exist yet, which is why so much of it works better at an outdoor festival than in a cellar, and why the bands that came out of it filled bigger rooms than the ones that stayed.
Riffs voiced in open fourths and fifths have no third in them, and therefore refuse to sound either happy or sad.
One man, the whole template
Almost all of it was worked out by Thomas Forsberg, who recorded as Quorthon and had already built two of the founding records of the first wave before he turned twenty. Bathory started the turn on Blood Fire Death in 1988, completed it on Hammerheart in 1990 with Forsberg handling lead and backing vocals, guitars, keyboards and synthesisers while a bassist and a drummer appeared under the pseudonyms Kothaar and Vvornth, and extended it on Twilight of the Gods in 1991. The song that gives the whole branch its subject is One Rode to Asa Bay, eleven minutes on the Christianisation of Scandinavia told from the losing side, which is the only genuinely new idea black metal had between 1987 and 1993.
Enslaved, and the north after Bathory
The band that took the idea and made a career of it started as two schoolboys. Enslaved were put together at Haugesund in 1991 by Ivar Bjørnson, thirteen years old, and Grutle Kjellson, seventeen, and the two of them have been the only constant members through more than three decades. Vikingligr Veldi came out in 1994 through Deathlike Silence Productions with exactly one track on it running under ten minutes, most of the words in Old Norse, and the arrangements built on repetition and slow accumulation rather than on attack. Frost followed the same year, colder and faster. Everything they have done since has moved further out, into progressive rock, jazz phrasing and clean singing, without ever losing the thread back to that first album.
Around them the north filled in quickly. Einherjer and Helheim worked the same seam through the middle of the nineties, and in Germany the one man project Falkenbach put out records that leaned harder on melody than on distortion. What all of them inherited from Bathory is the sense that a black metal record can be paced like a story rather than like an assault, and what separates the good ones from the rest is whether there is anything in the story worth telling.
Ireland, Finland, and the rest of the map
The mistake is to think this is a Scandinavian format. Primordial, formed at Skerries in County Dublin in 1993 out of a group that had been playing together since 1987, built ten albums between Imrama in 1995 and How It Ends in 2023 across Cacophonous, Hammerheart and Metal Blade, and their material comes out of Irish history and Irish myth rather than Norse, delivered by a singer whose phrasing owes as much to a ballad tradition as to metal. It is the strongest argument available that the branch is about how a people remember rather than about which people.
Moonsorrow made the Finnish case from Helsinki in 1995, writing exclusively in Finnish since 1999 and pushing the long form until it broke: Verisäkeet in 2005 runs past an hour, and their fifth album in 2007 consists of two pieces of roughly half an hour each. Their sources are Finnish poetry and legend, a body of material with no Norse gods in it at all.
- Bathory, Hammerheart (Noise, 1990). Where the whole thing starts.
- Enslaved, Vikingligr Veldi (Deathlike Silence, 1994). Old Norse, ten minute songs, no compromise anywhere.
- Primordial, The Gathering Wilderness (Metal Blade, 2005). The branch outside Scandinavia, at full strength.
- Moonsorrow, Verisäkeet (2005). The long form taken as far as it goes.
The folklore, and the thing it is not
The material these bands work from is real and it is written down. The Poetic Edda and Snorri Sturluson's prose account of the same myths, the Icelandic family sagas, the Finnish poetry Moonsorrow draws on, the Irish cycles behind Primordial: all of it survives in editions anyone can read. That matters, because the difference between the records worth keeping and the rest of them is usually whether the band read the sources or read a summary of somebody else's summary. Where this branch sits against everything else black metal split into is laid out in the family tree.
A political fringe attached itself to this imagery in the nineties and it has never entirely gone away. It is a separate subject with its own page and it is not the music described here; the two get confused because they share a set of pictures, which is a poor reason. Bands in this branch have said so themselves and acted on it, most visibly in 2021 when Moonsorrow pulled out of a festival after far right acts were added to the bill. Myth belongs to whoever reads it.
What is left, once the argument is set aside, is a body of music with an unusual problem to solve: how to write something that sounds ancient using instruments invented in the twentieth century, without the result turning into costume. Most attempts fail at that. The ones that do not are among the best records the genre has, and they connect straight back to the rest of KaosMetal on black metal. From here the family goes the other way entirely, into machines, and that is industrial Black Metal.
