Rockpedia
Heavy metal branch Full entry · 1993

Folk metal

Emerged 1993 Origin UK / Finland Subgenres 4 Vocals Sung and screamed
Heaviness
6
Speed
6
Melody
9

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

In short

Traditional instruments and folk melodies built into metal. Every region has written its own version.

How it sounds

  • Real traditional instruments — fiddle, pipes, flute, accordion — not just synthesizer patches.
  • Modal melodies from local folk music used as the main riff.
  • Folk dance rhythms adapted to a metal drum kit.

Hear what that means

  • The fiddle as lead instrument

    Skyclad - The Wayward Sons of Mother Earth

    A thrash band with a violinist playing the tune while the guitars accompany. It is one of very few metal genres where the guitar is not the melodic voice.

    Open on YouTube
  • Bagpipes, which cannot be retuned from 6:08

    Eluveitie - Slania

    The pipes are fixed in one key and the band moves to them. That constraint shapes the whole arrangement, and it is why folk metal songs sit in keys guitarists never otherwise choose.

    Open on YouTube at 6:08
  • A polka under a metal band

    Finntroll - Nattfödd

    The drums are playing humppa - a Finnish polka - under blast-capable metal instrumentation. The lurch that gives folk metal its feel comes from the beat, not the melody.

    Open on YouTube

Loaded only when you press play — nothing reaches Google before that. 1 of 3 is cued to a second read from the upload's own tracklist.

The specifics

Tempo
120-180 bpm
Song length
4-7 min
Tuning
E or D standard, alongside instruments with no fixed relationship to it — fiddles, pipes and hurdy-gurdies in whatever key the traditional tune lives in, which is a real arrangement problem.
Production
Layered and busy, with the traditional instruments mixed at or above guitar level. The production job here is unusual: keeping an acoustic fiddle audible against distorted rhythm guitars without turning it into a squeak.
Written about
Folklore and myth, Nature and the seasons, Drinking, extensively, Pre-Christian religion

What each part is doing

  • Guitar Playing the harmonic bed rather than the tune, because the tune belongs to the fiddle or the pipes. It is one of very few metal genres where the guitar is accompaniment.
  • Traditional instruments Violin, tin whistle, accordion, hurdy-gurdy or bagpipes, carrying the melody as a lead instrument. The pipes are the hard case: they are fixed in one key and cannot be retuned, so the band moves to them.
  • Bass Straight and supportive, because the harmonic movement in traditional tunes is fast and the low end has to stay simple to keep it legible.
  • Drums Frequently playing a polka or a march rather than a rock beat, which is what gives the genre its distinctive lurch.
  • Vocals Harsh, clean, or both in turn, and often in the band's own language — which is a genre convention rather than an accident.

What it isn't

That the traditional instruments are a novelty layer on top of a metal band. In the records that work they are structural: the songs are built on the melodic and rhythmic shapes of the tunes, which do not behave like rock riffs — they are modal, they move fast harmonically, and they frequently sit in metres a rock drummer has no habit for. Getting that to coexist with a distorted rhythm guitar is a genuine arrangement problem, and the genre's failures are mostly failures to solve it.

Told apart from

  • Viking metal Viking metal is the Scandinavian wing pointed at Norse material, and it grew out of black metal rather than out of the folk tradition — slower, colder and far more serious.
  • Celtic metal Celtic metal draws on Irish and Scottish tunes specifically, where the wider genre draws on whatever is local to the band.
  • Pagan / Viking black metal Pagan black metal shares the subject matter and keeps black metal's production and shriek. Folk metal is comparatively cheerful and comparatively clean.
  • Pirate metal The comic extreme of the same instincts, and the genre that most often gets folk metal dismissed by association.

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

History

Skyclad, formed by the former Sabbat vocalist, added a fiddle to thrash metal in 1990 and opened the door. In Finland the genre exploded in the 2000s: Korpiklaani came directly out of Sámi wedding music, while Finntroll combined black metal with humppa. Every region has written its own version since.

Descended from

Branches into

Siblings on this branch

Sounds like this, elsewhere in the tree

  • Hard rock 1.0 apart by rating · no shared ancestor
  • Post-grunge 1.4 apart by rating · no shared ancestor
  • 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. These share no ancestor with it at all.