Anna Murphy

Folk metal blends the power and riff-driven intensity of heavy metal with melodies, instruments, scales, and storytelling traditions from regional folk music. Typical arrangements combine distorted guitars, bass, and drums with fiddles, flutes, whistles, bagpipes, accordions, hurdy-gurdies, bouzoukis, and other traditional instruments. Bands often draw on myth, history, and local folklore for lyrical themes, ranging from epic sagas and battle hymns to drinking songs and pastoral ballads. The style spans a spectrum from aggressive and blackened approaches to upbeat, danceable, and festive moods, making it one of metal’s most diverse and regionally distinctive subgenres.

Medieval metal is a subgenre of folk metal that fuses the power and riff-driven weight of heavy metal with melodies, modes, and instruments associated with medieval and early modern European music. Centered largely in Germany—where it is known as Mittelalter-Metal or Mittelalter-Rock—the style features prominent use of hurdy-gurdy, bagpipes (Dudelsack), shawms/bombards, recorders, cittern/lute, nyckelharpa, and frame drums alongside distorted electric guitars, bass, and modern drum kits. Songs often draw on medieval dance rhythms (saltarello- or estampie-like pulses), modal melodies (Dorian, Aeolian, Mixolydian), and lyrics referencing legends, minstrelsy, battles, folk tales, and historical themes. Pioneered in the mid-to-late 1990s by bands such as Subway to Sally, In Extremo, and Schandmaul, the genre grew out of Germany’s Neo-Medieval movement and quickly established a vibrant live culture at medieval markets and major festivals.

Hurdy-gurdy is a drone‑based musical style centered on the hurdy-gurdy (vielle à roue), a string instrument sounded by a rosined wheel turned with a crank. Melodies are played on keyed chanterelle strings while one or more bourdon (drone) strings provide a continuous tonal bed. A distinctive "buzzing" bridge (the trompette or chien) can be engaged rhythmically by subtle wrist accents on the crank, turning the instrument into its own rhythm section. The genre draws on medieval, Renaissance, and rural European folk dance traditions (especially from central France, Iberia, and Central/Eastern Europe), but it also thrives in contemporary folk revival and experimental settings. Typical repertoire includes bourrées, waltzes, marches, and modal airs in Dorian, Mixolydian, and Aeolian modes, performed solo or with companions such as bagpipes, diatonic accordion, fiddle, and frame drums.