METAL BLADE
Heavy metal’s Viking chieftains trade epic poems for blood and guts
THIRTY YEARS AGO, if you’d said to Johan Hegg and his Viking-adoring metal minstrels that someday they’d be playing arenas and headlining festivals, they’d probably have laughed you out of whatever dive bar you’d found them in. Fate has a funny way of conspiring to make the implausible possible, however, and 12 albums later it’s hard to argue that anyone in heavy metal better embodies the sheer theatrical lunacy of our genre better than Hegg’s Viking horde somehow turning raging melodeath into a venue-filling spectacle on a par with the Iron Maidens and Rammsteins of this world.
is simultaneously everything that helped Amon Amarth climb to the top in the
