Rockpedia
Heavy metal branch Full entry · 1990

Pagan / Viking black metal

Emerged 1990 Origin Scandinavia Subgenres — Vocals Growled or shrieked
Heaviness
8
Speed
7
Melody
7

Growled or shrieked. Unintelligible without a lyric sheet. The thing most newcomers bounce off.

In short

Black metal with Norse mythology and folk melodies. Bathory's later albums are the starting point.

How it sounds

  • Modal melodies drawn from Nordic folk music, played on distorted guitars.
  • Male choirs and marching drum patterns.
  • Epic structures with long songs and dynamics running from silence to storm.

Hear what that means

Loaded only when you press play — nothing reaches Google before that. Every second here is the uploader's own, read from the recording's tracklist.

The specifics

Tempo
120-190 bpm
Song length
6-12 min
Tuning
D or E standard, with keyboards and occasional folk instruments, and tempos well below the second wave's.
Production
Big and hall-like rather than raw, with layered clean vocals and long reverbs. Bathory's Hammerheart established the sound and the genre still follows it.
Written about
Pre-Christian religion, Ancestry and land, Nature, Anti-Christianity, historically framed

What each part is doing

  • Guitar Slow, open tremolo and simple chord progressions held for a long time, closer to epic doom's pacing than to black metal's.
  • Keyboards Choir and horn pads providing scale, used continuously rather than as accent. This is the element that separates the genre from black metal proper.
  • Drums Mid-tempo and processional, with blasting reserved for peaks. The march is the genre's characteristic feel.
  • Vocals A harsh lead with layered clean male choruses answering it — the gang-sung chorus that viking metal shares.

What it isn't

That pagan and viking black metal are separate genres. The line is genuinely thin and mostly geographic — Norse subject matter gets called viking, everything else pagan — with Bathory sitting on both sides of it. This encyclopedia keeps them apart because the scenes do, not because the music divides cleanly.

Told apart from

  • Viking metal Very close, and the distinction is production and lineage: viking metal is Bathory's cleaner, slower invention; pagan black metal keeps more of black metal's rawness and shriek.
  • Second wave The second wave is fast, thin and hostile. This is slow, layered and ceremonial, and the purists regard it as a different thing entirely.
  • Atmospheric black metal Both use scale and slowness. Atmospheric black metal is about landscape as sensation; this is about ancestry and history.
  • Folk metal Folk metal uses living traditional music and is cheerful. Pagan black metal writes its own melodies and is not.

The genres this one is most often mistaken for. Written, not derived.

History

Bathory abandoned satanism after 1988 and wrote three albums about Norse mythology, effectively inventing Viking metal. Enslaved continued in Norway with lyrics in Old Norse, later evolving toward progressive metal. The branch is closely tied to folk metal but keeps its black metal foundation.

Descended from

Siblings on this branch

Sounds like this, elsewhere in the tree

Closest by the three ratings, among genres at least 4 steps away in the tree. A rating match is not a musical claim.