Viking metal
Sung and screamed. Clean singing and harsh vocals trade off, often chorus against verse.
In short
Norse themes, male choirs and marching tempos. It sounds like a longship, not a tavern.
How it sounds
- Massive male choirs singing in unison, for the effect of an army.
- Marching tempos, heavy drums and broad keyboards underneath.
- Lyrics about Norse mythology, battle and the sea.
Hear what that means
- Where the genre was invented
Bathory - Twilight of the Gods
Black metal slowed down with choirs added and no traditional instruments anywhere. Quorthon made both genres consecutively, and the tempo is the audible break.
Open on YouTube - Processional, not blasting from 2:52
Mid-tempo marching rather than blast beats, which is what gives the genre its ceremonial feel.
Open on YouTube at 2:52 - The gang-sung chorus
A Faroese ballad arranged for metal band, with layered clean male voices answering the lead. The chorus is a genre convention that comes from the subject matter.
Open on YouTube
Loaded only when you press play — nothing reaches Google before that. 2 of 3 are cued to a second read from the upload's own tracklist.
The specifics
- Tempo
- 120-180 bpm
- Song length
- 5-9 min
- Tuning
- D or C standard, with keyboards and folk instruments doubling the guitar lines. The arrangements are wide and the tempos slower than black metal's.
- Production
- Epic and layered, with long reverbs and choirs. Bathory's later records established a production aesthetic — huge, cold and hall-like — that the genre still follows.
- Written about
- Norse myth, Ancestry and land, Battle, Paganism
What each part is doing
- Guitar Mid-tempo riffing built on open chords and slow harmonic movement, closer to traditional metal than to black metal, with tremolo reserved for peaks.
- Keyboards Choir and horn pads giving the arrangements their scale — the single most consistent element across the genre.
- Drums Marching and mid-tempo more often than blasting, which is what gives the genre its processional feel.
- Vocals Harsh lead with clean, layered male choruses answering it. The gang-sung chorus is a genre convention and comes from the subject matter as much as from the music.
What it isn't
That it is folk metal about Vikings. Musically it comes from the other direction entirely — Bathory invented it by slowing black metal down and adding choirs, with no traditional instruments involved at all. Folk metal grafts real folk melody onto metal; viking metal writes its own and takes its atmosphere from production. The subject matter is shared and the method is not.
Told apart from
- Folk metal Folk metal uses living traditional music and is frequently cheerful. Viking metal grew out of black metal, uses invented rather than inherited melody, and is far more solemn.
- Pagan / Viking black metal Pagan black metal keeps black metal's production and rawness with the same subject matter. Viking metal is cleaner, slower and grander.
- Black metal Bathory made both, consecutively. Viking metal is what that band did after black metal, and the tempo and the choirs are the audible break.
- Epic doom Both are slow, grand and mythological, with clean layered vocals. Epic doom comes from Sabbath, this from black metal.
The genres this one is most often mistaken for. Written, not derived.
History
Bathory invented the genre practically alone, across three albums between 1988 and 1991, after abandoning satanic themes. Enslaved brought black metal rigour, and Amon Amarth combined the formula with melodic death metal and reached large festivals. Týr, from the Faroe Islands, brings genuinely traditional melodies into metal structures.
Descended from
Siblings on this branch
Sounds like this, elsewhere in the tree
- Progressive metalcore 1.0 apart by rating · meets it at Heavy metal
- New nu metal 1.0 apart by rating · meets it at Heavy metal
Closest by the three ratings, among genres at least 4 steps away in the tree. A rating match is not a musical claim.