Your favorite Viking band.

[neuroticandroid]

enslaved, no question

 

[all_sins_undone]

So let's get this straight. If Bathory (before Quorthon's death) started playing a lethal mix of glam-metal, metalcore and progressive-stoner-sludge-metal yet still sung about the vikings, you'd still call it Viking Metal?

/owned

 

[My Arms, Your Purse]

They'd probably go under Viking metal yeah, but it would be incredibly bad and no one would care about it anyways. And not all of Bathory's releases are viking metal, no one said that. At least I said that Hammerheart, Blood Fire Death, Twilight of the Gods & Blood on Ice are simply essential, groundbreaking and pioneering for everything associated to viking metal.

The first group to use an early version of Viking metal was Led Zeppelin with songs like "Immigrant Song" and "No Quarter" with references to famous Vikings and Viking gods. But the first heavy metal band to combine all the elements typical of the genre was Yngwie J. Malmsteen's Rising Forces's song "I Am a Viking" in the 1985 album Marching Out. The first entire album to be dominated by such an ideology can be traced to the Swedish black metal band Bathory, with the release of their fourth album in 1988, Blood Fire Death. The album blended the aesthetics of black metal with an atmosphere of war and Norse mythology. Quorthon (the leader of Bathory) explains some of the philosophy behind the musical and lyrical changes from black metal to Viking metal in Bathory on the official website.[1]