The Best Folk / Pagan / Viking Metal Album - Metal Storm Awards 2025

Amorphis - Borderland

Amorphis spent most of the 2010s making their long-established signature sound increasingly heavier; in the 2020s, their focus has shifted, and on their first album since ending their long-standing relationship with producer Jens Bogren, the Finns have found new ways to spice up their uncategorizable mix of folk, melodic death and progressive metal. Borderland is dominated by the writing of keyboardist Santeri Kallio, and the lighter earworms on the album fully exhibit the band's exquisite charm, as do interesting experiments with disco and Middle Eastern influences. However, as ever, it is the instantly memorable folkish guitar melodies of Esa Holopainen that once again come to define the sound of the band and the record, and long may it continue.

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Apocalypse Orchestra - A Plague Upon Thee

You kids oughta be more careful throwing around those plague hexes, you know; remember what happened with Cattle Decapitation?  Although it was actually much worse where Apocalypse Orchestra are from, which is somewhere in the mid-14th century.  This orchestra includes instruments such as mandola, cittern, rauschpfeife, and hurdy-gurdy (plus plenty of friends), a whole assortment of strings and cranks and reeds to bring you back to a much older time, plus a mountainous mound of metal to back up the melodies with an abiding sense of doom.  And in this epic doom is some epic gloom, transmitted through gentle yet somber vocals and the interplay of bagpipe and guitar leads.  This medieval-oriented brand of folk music is often disproportionately underrepresented in folk metal, but it makes a natural combination with doom (because it's not like the present has a monopoly on pessimistic outlooks).

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Bloody Valkyria - In Our Home, Across The Fog

Only seven months after a monstrous debut that stole our hearts and our treasure in equal measure, Jere Kervinen returned with a second Bloody Valkyria album that rivals, if not outdoes, the first.  Exchanging The Silmarillion for Elden Ring as its source of conceptual inspiration, In Our Home, Across The Fog wields epic high-fantasy black metal with folkish overtones and grand symphonic compositions for a stirring, transportive work of massive extreme metal.  Lachrymose flutes and violins, cinematically gloomy orchestrations, and charismatic guitar leads define a folk-inflected symphony similar to, but not interchangeable with, the extreme power/folk sound often associated with Finland; meanwhile, the use of synthesizers for both texture and melody, sometimes simultaneously, evokes dungeon synth, which is appropriate for a fantasy-inspired album based largely in black metal.  If your sword has been hanging on the coatrack and gathering dust, it's about time you sharpened it and went to slay something with this as your soundtrack.

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Ereb Altor - Hälsingemörker

Ten albums into their career, Ereb Altor have still got it. Hälsingemörker is yet another worthy entry in the Swedes’ catalogue of Viking doom metal, a style they have truly made their own over the years. If you’ve heard an Ereb Altor album in the past, Hälsingemörker won’t surprise you; it’s more of the same hard-hitting and catchy Viking doom. But when the same in question is this good, there may not be any need for change.

Havukruunu - Tavastland

Five years after an underground trio leveled Ensiferum and Finntroll to take Best Folk/Pagan/Viking Metal Album, Tavastland defends the honor of reigning champs Havukruunu.  The production imbues it with a sense of vast space, just the degree of unapproachable power you want from something both ancient and dramatic, and yet it has an overwhelming immediacy thanks to its sheer energy: the lightning-hot guitars and coarse cries sweep clear across the endless plains and through your speakers to smack you upside the helm.  When Uinuos Syömein Sota was released, it awakened us to just how stagnant so much of the folk metal scene had become; Havukruunu could hardly put the scales back on our eyes after that.  Thus they've given us yet another barrage of champion material, a colossal storm of furious melodies and staggering energy that can once again topple giants.

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Nine Treasures - Seeking The Absolute

Mongolian folk music has had prominent international champions in Tengger Cavalry and The Hu and it has built a tidy little fusion scene for itself, but there is really no band to beat Nine Treasures: no one else has been as productive, as consistent, as much of an indisputable heavy metal band as them, and with five full-length treasures now in the saddle, they've got a healthy legacy all to themselves even aside from their cultural prominence.  A mixture of throat singing, harsh vocals, and distinctive cleans all in Mongolian leads a cavalry in thousands, with traditional instruments such as morin-khuur and tovshuur galloping alongside guitars; Seeking The Absolute is a respectful marriage between Mongolian folk and classic heavy metal, with each balancing and learning from the other, and the result is not only a fresh sound even within a pretty small scene already but an album that can easily be enjoyed by listeners who would typically enjoy only one half of the equation.

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Saor - Amidst The Ruins

Saor is one of the first names in atmospheric metal these days, and it's because Andy Marshall knows how to let landscapes speak for themselves.  For Saor, that's where the inspiration is: amidst the ruins, on the old battlefields, in the green glens and dun straths and blue lakes depicted on the transportive album covers.  The deeps of Scotland's past echo in gales of sweeping riffage, the strident skirling of pipes and plaintive whistles, the distant roars of faint human imprints on a land that outlasts them.  It's a proud musical tradition not just of Scotland but of Saor to which Amidst The Ruins belongs, as stirringly beautiful as Marshall's folkloric black metal has ever been and as clean of false notes as the rest of them.  While this album features an expanded vocal presence, with more variety and frequency of clean singing than usual, it's still a hills-first, people-second album, so if you need to forget your place in the present for an hour, Amidst The Ruins is the place to do it.

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Valhalore - Beyond The Stars

It took eight years after their debut album for Valhalore to share their next endeavours with the world, and Beyond The Stars is absolutely worth the wait. Blackened elements in their past have largely disappeared, in place of a folk/melodeath/extreme power fusion that is infectious, storming, and fist-pumping. Sophie Christensen's ensemble of wind instruments bring folkish charm, while Lachlan Neate's charismatic clean/harsh dual lead vocals effortlessly guide listeners through these spellbinding romps.

Vermilia - Karsikko

Vermilia writes, performs, records, and co-produces, she creates her own album artwork and shoots her own videos, and she'll even make her own drums.  That's an exhausting level of DIY, but in the escalation of do-it-yourself to do-everything-yourself, Vermilia has never left the music for last, and her marvelous third full-length sounds so composed and organic that it doesn't warrant comparison to your typical black metal solo projects.  Karsikko does emanate that same primal rawness, only it's smoothed and swaddled in the more beautiful darkness of Finnish folk.  There's an elvish quality to Vermilia's voice, which mixes harsh roars and quietly ecstatic cleans, intimate legend-spinning and clean choruses like spells solemnly declared: her vocals seem to flow through the air from a primeval source, settling like dew on dark pastures of melody.  It's as though while walking through an ancient wood you peered through the mist at a distant glow and saw Vermilia wreathed in light, whispering these songs to the trees.  Yet Karsikko is enamored of the power in epic doom and pagan black metal, and it not altogether so ephemeral: it is, after all, folk metal.  And in that regard it is one of the best albums of recent memory.

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Vintersorg - Vattenkrafternas Spel

One of the most multi-faceted acts within folk metal, Vintersorg return with yet another high-quality entry in their already extensively great catalogue. Vattenkrafternas Spel dials back on the progressive elements that had become a core part of Vintersorg’s sound over the years and instead focuses on the Viking black part of their music. This is accompanied by their usual excellent songwriting and sense of melody, leading to some maybe simpler but catchier tracks than what they had gotten us used to. It’s a very memorable and enjoyable experience, in line with the high-quality material that the band has been delivering for the last 30 years.