Folk Metal

Folk metal is heavy metal fused with the traditional music of a particular place. Distorted guitars, bass and drums play alongside fiddles, bagpipes, whistles, hurdy-gurdies, accordions or regional instruments such as the Finnish kantele and the Mongolian morin khuur, and the melodies come from — or imitate — local dance tunes and songs. Lyrics usually draw on that region's mythology, history and language.

Because it is defined by what it borrows, folk metal sounds very different from country to country: Irish reels in one band, Finnish polka-like humppa in another, Gaulish-language Celtic in a third. This guide covers its origins in early-1990s England and Scandinavia, the scenes that followed, the instruments, the subgenres from Viking to pirate metal, and how it differs from plain folk and folk rock. Want to know what a classifier hears in fiddle-over-riffs? Run a clip through our free AI music genre detector.

The central idea is simple: a metal band plays a folk melody, or a folk musician joins a metal band. In practice the fusion takes many forms. Some bands use real traditional instruments as permanent members of the line-up; others play folk melodies on guitar or keyboard; some alternate acoustic folk passages with metal sections, while others play both at once. The metal side can be anything from power metal to black or melodic death metal, which is why vocals range from clean choirs to harsh growls.

What unites the style is a sense of place. Folk metal bands sing about their own ancestors' gods, wars, sagas and drinking traditions, often in their own language or a historical one. That is also what separates it from folk music in the narrow sense, where the songs come from an unbroken oral tradition: folk metal is a modern reinvention of tradition, built for festival stages.

The mood is broader than in most metal. Folk metal can be solemn and epic, but it is famous for its party wing — songs about beer, vodka and trolls designed for crowds to dance to. Few other metal styles make jigging, polka-style dancing and circle pits part of the same show.

The groundwork was laid in rock. In the late 1960s and 1970s British folk rock — Fairport Convention, Steeleye Span, Jethro Tull with Ian Anderson's flute — proved that traditional tunes could be electrified, and Led Zeppelin brought folk colour into hard rock, while Thin Lizzy's twin guitars borrowed directly from Irish music. In metal, Iron Maiden's harmonised melodies often had a folk shape.

The genre itself is usually traced to Skyclad, formed in England in 1990 by singer Martin Walkyier after he left the thrash band Sabbat. Their debut The Wayward Sons of Mother Earth (1991) put a violin over thrash riffs, and on later albums the fiddle became central. In Sweden at the same time, Bathory — Quorthon's project, one of the founders of black metal — turned towards slow, epic, Norse-themed records with choirs and folk-like melodies on Blood Fire Death (1988) and Hammerheart (1990), creating what came to be called Viking metal.

The mid-1990s added national variants. In Ireland, Cruachan combined black metal with tin whistle, bodhrán and Irish legends on Tuatha na Gael (1995). Finland's Amorphis built Tales from the Thousand Lakes (1994) on the national epic, the Kalevala, with folk-styled melodies over melodic death metal. Norway's Enslaved and Sweden's Falkenbach and Månegarm developed the Viking and pagan side. In Germany, a distinct medieval rock and metal scene formed around bands such as In Extremo and Subway to Sally, using bagpipes, shawms and hurdy-gurdies.

The late 1990s and 2000s made folk metal a festival genre, with Finland at the centre. Finntroll fused black metal with humppa, a fast Finnish dance music, and sang in Swedish about trolls; "Trollhammaren" (2004) became a scene anthem. Ensiferum took an epic, melodic-death direction; Korpiklaani turned the party wing into an international brand with accordion and fiddle and songs such as "Vodka" (2009); Turisas called their style "battle metal". Switzerland's Eluveitie brought hurdy-gurdy, bagpipes and lyrics in the extinct Gaulish language to melodic death metal on Slania (2008). Russia's Arkona, the Faroe Islands' Týr, Israel's Orphaned Land and Scotland's pirate-metal band Alestorm showed how far the formula could travel.

The most visible recent example came from Mongolia. The Hu combined throat singing, the horsehead fiddle (morin khuur) and the tovshuur lute with heavy rock and metal rhythms; their videos for "Yuve Yuve Yu" and "Wolf Totem" spread widely in 2018–2019, and their debut album The Gereg followed in 2019.

Typical features:

• Tempo: very wide — epic Viking material at 70–110 BPM, dance-driven humppa and polka-style songs at 160–200 BPM and above.
• Melody: folk modes (Dorian and Mixolydian are common in Celtic-influenced bands), pentatonic melodies in Asian folk metal, and tunes that follow the phrasing of reels, jigs and polkas.
• Rhythm: metal drumming that adopts folk dance meters — 6/8 jig feels, oom-pah polka patterns, galloping triplets.
• Lead instruments: fiddle, whistle, flute, bagpipes, accordion or hurdy-gurdy taking the melody that a lead guitar would play in other metal.
• Vocals: anything from harsh growls and shrieks to clean folk singing, choral chants and, in Mongolian and Tuvan-influenced bands, throat singing.
• Language: frequent use of native or historical languages — Finnish, Swedish, Irish, Faroese, Gaulish, Mongolian.
• Themes: mythology, pre-Christian religion, sagas, battles, nature and drinking.

Folk metal is one of the hardest metal styles to mix, because acoustic instruments are quiet and distorted guitars are loud:

• Close-miked and pickup-equipped acoustic instruments — fiddles, hurdy-gurdies and whistles are amplified with contact pickups or clip-on microphones so they survive on a festival stage.
• Keyboard substitutes — many bands, especially early on, played folk melodies on synthesiser accordion, flute or string patches instead of hiring musicians.
• Guitars that leave room — rhythm guitars often play simpler power-chord patterns so that the folk instrument can carry the melody, sometimes doubling it an octave below.
• Large line-ups — seven or eight members is normal; Eluveitie has toured with eight or more musicians.
• Gang vocals and chants — recorded as crowds to sound like a tavern or a war band.

Production ranges from raw, black-metal-influenced recordings to polished, modern metal mixes. Labels such as Spinefarm and Nuclear Blast helped turn the Finnish and Swiss bands into international festival acts, and dedicated events such as the touring Paganfest packaged the scene for audiences across Europe and North America.

• Celtic metal — Irish, Scottish and Gaulish traditions: Cruachan, Primordial, Eluveitie.
• Viking metal — epic, slow-to-mid tempo, Norse mythology: Bathory's Hammerheart, Enslaved, Amon Amarth (more melodic death metal in sound).
• Pagan metal — pre-Christian religion and nature, often with black metal roots: Moonsorrow, Arkona, Primordial.
• Humppa and party folk metal — fast, dance-based, beer and vodka: Finntroll, Korpiklaani.
• Medieval metal — German bands with bagpipes, shawms and Middle High German lyrics: In Extremo, Subway to Sally, Saltatio Mortis.
• Pirate metal — sea shanties and accordion over power metal: Alestorm, with Running Wild's pirate-themed heavy metal of the late 1980s as a forerunner.
• Oriental metal — Middle Eastern scales and instruments: Orphaned Land, Myrath; related in mood to klezmer and other modal traditions.
• Asian folk metal and rock — The Hu (Mongolia), Chthonic (Taiwan), Wagakki Band (Japan).

A starting list:

• Skyclad — The Wayward Sons of Mother Earth (1991).
• Bathory — Hammerheart (1990).
• Amorphis — Tales from the Thousand Lakes (1994).
• Cruachan — Tuatha na Gael (1995).
• Finntroll — Nattfödd (2004), "Trollhammaren".
• Ensiferum — Ensiferum (2001).
• Korpiklaani — Spirit of the Forest (2003); "Vodka" from Karkelo (2009).
• Eluveitie — Slania (2008).
• Týr — Eric the Red (2003).
• Alestorm — Captain Morgan's Revenge (2008).
• Orphaned Land — Mabool (2004).
• The Hu — The Gereg (2019).

Folk music in the broad sense is acoustic and tradition-based, from ballad singers to the 1960s revival. Folk rock electrified it with drums and electric guitars but kept rock's moderate volume and clean or lightly driven tones. Celtic music is the living instrumental and song tradition of Ireland, Scotland, Brittany and Galicia, much of which folk metal bands borrow from. Folk metal adds the full weight of metal: high-gain guitars, double-kick drums, and often harsh vocals.

A quick test: if the drums and guitars could be removed and the song would still stand as a traditional tune, and the guitars are heavily distorted, it is folk metal. If the guitars are clean or lightly overdriven, it is folk rock. For more on the folk family, see our country vs folk comparison.

Folk metal gives a classifier conflicting evidence by design. The rhythm section and distorted guitars produce the dense, wideband energy of metal, while fiddle, whistle, bagpipe and accordion produce bright, tonal, narrow-band lines associated with traditional and acoustic music. The balance changes not only between bands but between sections of one song: an acoustic intro with whistle and bodhrán can sound purely traditional, while the full-band chorus sounds plainly metal.

Test both an acoustic and a full-band passage in the Genre AI music genre detector to see where the reading switches.

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