Rockpedia
Heavy metal branch Full entry · 2006

Pirate metal

Emerged 2006 Origin Scotland Subgenres — Vocals Sung and screamed
Heaviness
6
Speed
7
Melody
10

Sung and screamed. Clean singing and harsh vocals trade off, often chorus against verse.

In short

Power metal with accordion and lyrics about rum. A small genre, entirely shameless and very effective live.

How it sounds

  • Accordion, fiddle and hurdy-gurdy-style keyboards over fast power metal.
  • Choruses written as sea shanties, built for singing in unison.
  • Lyrics exclusively about pirates, rum and naval battles — without exception.

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
150-200 bpm
Song length
4-6 min
Tuning
E or D standard alongside accordion, whistle and keyboard, in the folk metal manner but pitched at sea shanties rather than at dance tunes.
Production
Big, bright and polished, produced like power metal rather than like folk metal. The comedy requires clarity; a murky mix would kill the jokes.
Written about
Piracy, Drinking, Comedy, sustained across whole careers, The sea

What each part is doing

  • Guitar Power metal riffing and harmonised leads, played straight — the musicianship is deliberately not part of the joke.
  • Keyboards and accordion Carrying shanty melodies over metal instrumentation, which is the entire premise executed literally.
  • Drums Fast double kick under a melody that scans as a drinking song, and the mismatch is the point.
  • Vocals Growled and sung in turn, with gang choruses on every refrain, delivered with complete commitment to the conceit.

What it isn't

That it cannot be taken seriously. Running Wild spent thirty years making pirate-themed heavy metal with no irony whatsoever, and the comic wing that followed is played by musicians whose competence is not in question. The genre is a good test of whether you think a fixed comic subject disqualifies music, which is a question about the listener rather than about the records.

Told apart from

  • Folk metal Pirate metal is folk metal with a single fixed theme and a comic register. Musically it is folk metal; the difference is entirely one of subject.
  • Power metal The riffing, the production and the choruses are power metal's. Running Wild were a power metal band who chose a subject and kept it.
  • Celtic metal Both use folk instruments over metal. Celtic metal is solemn and historical; this is neither, on purpose.
  • Symphonic power metal Shares the polish and the choruses, and swaps the fantasy libretto for a nautical one.

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

History

Running Wild started in the 1980s as a heavy metal band with pirate themes taken entirely seriously. Alestorm, formed in Scotland in 2004, picked the idea up with fully acknowledged humour and built an international career on it. It is one of the few genres defined by subject matter rather than sound.

Descended from

Siblings on this branch

Sounds like this, elsewhere in the tree

  • NWOTHM 1.0 apart by rating · meets it at Heavy metal
  • Easycore 1.4 apart by rating · no shared ancestor

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