BATHORY — Hammerheart (review)

BATHORY — Hammerheart album cover Album · 1990 · Viking Metal Buy this album from MMA partners
5/5 ·
Warthur
Originally, Bathory had recorded Blood On Ice as a followup to Blood Fire Death, but on reflection Quorthon was concerned that the loyal Bathory fanbase wouldn't embrace that album's folky-thrashy-operatic brand of epic storytelling metal. So instead the band released Hammerheart, which took a similar approach to songwriting but added masses of black metal riffs to create an incredible wall of sound, and a revolutionary album which served as the blueprint for much Viking metal to come. (In particular, Enslaved's career has been based on first learning to match the sound of Hammerheart, and then taking its progressive inclinations still further.)

Leaning more and more towards long, epic tracks based around the sagas of the pagan North and more or less abandoning the band's Satanic past, Hammerheart completes the sonic transformation begun on Blood Fire Death in admirable form and is the second masterpiece from Bathory's classic Viking metal era.
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