After more than two and a half years, we’re back with a second set of recommendations of relatively recent heavy music that may appeal to those of Pagan persuasion.
We offer this service to you, the music listener who may be looking for something besides the usual suspects.
Maybe you’ve come to the conclusion that the new wave of pagan folk metal that dresses itself in wild costumes as it produces ritual-like on-stage performances is really just the latest version of theatrical rock that goes back through Amon Amarth’s Viking cosplay and Manowar’s comic-booky barbarian strutting, Alice Cooper’s decapitation rites and King Diamond’s horror shows, all the way to Arthur Brown’s crazy world and Hawkwind’s space rituals. It’s all in good fun, but the latest iteration is as close to “how the Vikings really did it” as Meatloaf was to actually summoning a bat out of Hell.
Maybe you’ve finally figured out that the guy who wrote the most famous history of black metal is deeply involved with the neo-völkisch Asatru [sic] Folk Assembly and you just can’t get past the nagging suspicion that every band in the genre is somehow connected to white nationalist ideology, given the fact that even the seemingly okay ones tell English-language outlets that they’re “apolitical” while ranting against immigrants and refugees when they get interviewed in Danish or Norwegian or whatever.
Maybe you just have an itch for heavy music that isn’t being scratched by any of the more popular and obvious names that get bandied about as Pagan-ish.
I’m here to tell you that there’s new music out there that may appeal to your Pagan heart, get your head banging, and possibly even hit you right in the center of your nostalgia while simultaneously pulling your ears in unfamiliar directions.
For each of the five albums, I’ve hyperlinked the release title to the Bandcamp page for the album. More than ever, musicians need your support. Now that even miniscule streaming revenues are being threatened by the explosive growth of AI slop, we all need to go back to paying for downloads, buying CDs, and ordering vinyl.
If there is to be human-produced new music in the future, we must support the creators now.
For each album, I’ve picked one track that – in a different era of music – may have been the single released off the album and promoted on radio. For each featured track, I’ve linked to the Bandcamp page or YouTube video for that specific song.
Enjoy the music, and don’t forget to bang your head.
Green Lung
This Heathen Land: A Journey into Occult Albion (2023)
Nuclear Blast Records
This is the album you’ve been waiting for, all these long years.
Look at that album cover, featuring the Wild Hunt itself and looking like a Penguin book from 1968. Read the song titles, including “The Forest Church,” “Mountain Throne,” “Song of the Stones,” “The Ancient Ways,” and “Hunters in the Sky.”
If that alone hasn’t already set your Pagan heart to beating, open the gatefold vinyl sleeve and pull out the “The Pocket Map of This Heathen Land,” featuring a key to abandoned ruins, enchanted woods, sacred stones, shadowed subterranea, and other places to visit in the land formerly known as Albion.
Then pull out the LP-sized notebook that contains the lyrics set into the tracking of occult travels preceded by these instructions:
For best results this album should be listened to as loudly as possible on British moorland, at the centre of a stone circle, at midnight, with no light save for the moon and stars, approximately thirty minutes after consuming two handfuls of freshly picked Liberty Cap mushrooms (psilocybe semilanceata).
You definitely want to splurge on the vinyl edition for this one.
Just in case you haven’t already picked it up from the packaging, the album’s spoken prologue sets the mood. With its analog synth backing and archly urbane narrator, it gave me flashbacks to being both fascinated and frightened by the mysteries presented by Leonard Nimoy on In Search of…
Beyond the cities and motorways of modern Britain, away from the influence of its Christian churches and cathedrals, lies another country. An older, stranger country. A country of lonely tors and desolate moors, of forgotten woods and mysterious standing stones. You are about to embark on a journey into occult Albion.
Come.
It’s time to explore this heathen land.
The music is built on brilliant guitar and bass riffs reminiscent of Sabotage-era Black Sabbath mixed with interpolated keyboards like the heaviest bits of Blue Öyster Cult’s back catalogue. Vocalist Tom Templar sounds a bit like Manilla Road’s Mark Shelton or The Bevis Frond’s Nick Saloman as he sings devastatingly catchy ear-worm melodies.
The hit single: “The Ancient Ways.” This one has everything you need to begin your journey. Sit down in the dark, turn on the black light, get the incense going, put on your giant headphones, and take a trip “down the old straight track through the wildwood.” If I’d found this album back in high school in the 1980s, I would have absolutely plotzed.
The Neptune Power Federation
Goodnight My Children (2024)
Cruz del Sur Music
As the son of a German immigrant, I first experienced the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm as stories my father would tell to distract me from how tired my little four-year-old feet were during hikes in the forest. I still vividly remember being entranced by those tellings way back in the golden autumn days of the 1970s.
That early connection between glowing forest and magical tale provided fertile ground for my later interest in Heathenry.
I can’t say how common my deep love for the work of the Grimms is among today’s Pagans and Heathens. I suspect it may also be an artifact of older generations. How many American kids born in the 21st century were told the old tales by their parents?
For those like me, this album by the Australian band hits a spot deep down in memory and emotion.
Like the album by Green Lung, the vinyl release is truly something special. The version I have is on neon green vinyl in a beautifully and creepily illustrated gatefold sleeve with an included lyric sheet.
But what makes this particular packaging of the album so magical is that it comes with a book of original fairy tales written and illustrated by guitarist Mike Foxall. The tracks of the album adapt Foxall’s tales, making the whole thing a concept album worthy of the long-gone heyday of the vinyl LP.
Foxall’s tales are incredibly weird and frightening, as those who’ve read Jack Zipes’s translation of The Original Folk & Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm know the stories truly were, before they were cleaned up for the nursery.
I use the Zipes edition as the core text for my college course on the Grimms, and it’s always fun to witness student reactions to the bloody and sometimes amoral tales, so different from the Disneyfied versions we know that were so hated by J.R.R. Tolkien for fundamentally altering the nature of the stories.
I’m a big fan of the toad and frog tales in the Grimms’ collection, and I think the band’s “Evermore” is a great addition to the canon that also makes a rockin’ song. The chilling tale of “Hariette Mae” fits in with the dark forces threatening children in the original Grimm tales and is another ear-worm rocker.
Actually, the entire second side of the album is packed with bangers. It may be my favorite album side of this century, so far.
I always describe the band as the raging love-child of the Go-Go’s and AC/DC. The powerful lead vocals of The Imperial Priestess Screaming Loz Sutch thankfully sound nothing like the interchangeable voices of the generic pretty ladies that front modern symphonic metal groups but instead soar over the tightly heavy riffing of the fantastic band and the richly layered vocal harmonies that she surrounds herself with.
Listening to the vinyl by candelight is highly recommended.
The hit single: “Betrothed to the Serpent.” The tale is fantastic and the song is brilliant. Everything that this group does best is right there in this track. It will lodge itself in your brain, for sure. Enjoy.
SpellBook
Deadly Charms (2022)
Cruz del Sur Music
I included SpellBook’s fantastic 2020 album Magick & Mischief in my first column on new heavy music. This follow-up is just as strong and arguably more consistently focused on absolutely rocking throughout.
Nate Tyson definitely deserves more attention as a metal frontman and visionary. His tales of charms, witches, goddesses, and spells under white oak hypnotize the listener as the band gallops lustily through a musical territory from an alternate world where Thin Lizzy and Black Sabbath were joined as a unitary musical juggernaut.
“Rehmeyer’s Hollow” sounds like a lost Witchfinder General track as Nate sings of breaking a harmful hex.
Folk magick seize the power
Image under the bill
The Long Lost Friend
Going in for the kill
If he don’t lift this Hex I will
There’s great variety here. “Pandemonium” digs deep into groovy bell-bottom cowbell-dinging riffing, while the epic “Her Spectral Armies” is framed by ethereal wordless vocals by guest Rachel Robison.
“The Witch of Ridley Creek” is a heavy boogie number, and the hard-charging “Night of the Doppelganger” veers close to early Iron Maiden.
I almost picked “Goddess” as the hit single, and I expect it will appeal to readers of The Wild Hunt not just as an insanely catchy rocker with a great hook but also for its lyrics.
I always see your face my Goddess
My blood and bones I give for thee
Devotion in your name my Goddess
Forever yours eternallyA long time ago
There was a Goddess
Whom I adored
Man’s evil spirit took her away
In a righteous world, this band would be headlining major festivals.
The hit single: “Out for Blood.” This tale of vampiric love is different from everything else on the album. Again, it suggests an alternate world, but this time it’s one where wizards of doom recorded the soundtrack songs for 1980s John Hughes teenager movies. So good.
Ealdor Bealu
Psychic Forms (2022)
Metal Assault Records
My 2023 column on new heavy music included Spirit of the Lonely Places, the 2019 album by the band named for an Old English term for “life’s evil, death.” At the time, vocalist and guitarist Travis Abbott told me about the band’s connection to Paganism.
I tend to draw inspiration from more nature-based ideologies that center the natural world and our relationship to it, such as Norse/Celtic mythology and Taoism. Along with this, such ideologies also seem to fully acknowledge the duality and complexity of humanity more than other common religious practices, which is a constant theme in our music.
In light of this statement, it’s easy to read Travis’ lyrics to the gorgeously sprawling “Way of the Sudden Storm” as a reflection on Odin’s self-sacrifice on the World Tree, as described in verses 138-139 of the Old Icelandic Hávamál (“Sayings of the High One”).
New patterns arise
Chaos becomes order
Emerge from the haze
Knowing becomes allTorn and twisted, tormented
Tested true through tortures
Remembered pain from the tree
A torrent seized by tidesProjector of psychic forms
Rouser of the tempest
The winds will come yet again
The will to die to know
Odin is, of course, the Norse god who arguably most embodies “the duality and complexity of humanity.”
Throughout the album, the layered guitars shimmer across the stereo field, sometimes shockingly independent, sometimes joining together in ultimate heaviness. The band manages to sound both immediately present and dreamily ambient as they create vast Lovecraftian soundscapes.
The male vocals seem always at the edge of hearing, as if they’re coming to us from behind the wall of sleep and beyond the realms of death. When bassist Rylie Collingwood sings, she sounds like a Valkyrie keening her lament across the fjord. Breathtaking.
The hit single: “Laid on Display.” Rylie takes the vocal lead on this chillingly beautiful song that also gets richly heavy. Remember the scene in the X-Files spinoff Millennium where Special Agent Emma Hollis discovers a bloody scene of multiple murders while “Love Hurts” by Nazareth plays? That’s the feeling this song gives me, in a good way.
Dungeon Weed
The Eye of the Icosahedron (2022)
Fuzzy Mind Records
This is just one of many excellent emanations from the mystical mind of Dmitri Mavra.
The first musical project of his that I heard was the super-rockin’ album Doubleblind by his band Skunk, which is fully in the mode of early 1970s rock. It sounds like a conversion van with floor-to-ceiling shag carpet and a Frank Frazetta painting on the side. I mean that as a very high compliment.
The self-titled album by his band Slow Phase is another slice of groovy retro-rock, maybe with a bit of James Gang thrown in for extra black velvet power.
Dungeon Weed is a whole other thing.
Maybe it’s again generational, but I suspect that a high percentage of today’s Pagans of a certain age grew up playing Dungeons & Dragons. This album is definitely for those among us who still flip through the original Deities & Demigods, wonder at its arcane contents, and marvel at the fact that a tabletop role-playing game taught us about so many different figures from so many diverse religions of the world (plus the work of Lovecraft and Moorcock).
1970s and 1980s D&D sessions were often played with a soundtrack of Rush or Dio, much of which now seems almost pop-ish in comparison to the down-tempo, down-tuned sounds from the world of sludgy stoner doom metal.
Musically, that’s where this album sits. It’s more heavy than the other albums discussed here, in the sense that younger metalheads now use the term, closer to 2000s Electric Wizard than to the 1970s rock influences of Dmitri’s earlier projects.
The tempo is slow and slower, the guitar tuning is low and lower, the vocals are chant-like, and everything is fuzzed out to the max.
The growling and wailing vocals are sometimes doubled by Thia Moonbrook, whose soaring contributions add another level of unreal smoky disorientation to the mix.
Just when you may feel overwhelmed by dungeon sludge, the band surprises you with a quiet, gauzy, and mostly acoustic interlude like the gorgeous “Dream Powder” and the eerie “Hypnagogic Revelations.”
Lyrically, the double album delves into dungeons deep. The title track tells of the mystic Icosahedron, a polyhedron with twenty faces that just happens to have the form of the twenty-sided die key to D&D gameplay.
The album comes with an insert that weaves the titles and lyrics into what reads like the personal journal of an undead necromancer. There is “The Invocation of Y’ag Z’gyroth,” “Twenty Planes of Reality,” and “Forgotten Chambers,” all of which could be titles of Lovecraft chapters or what we used to call modules.
But many of the song titles reflect a focus on dream vision and inner journeys: “Beyond the Door of Meta-Consciousness,” “Descent into the Psionic Abyss,” “The Inner Maze of the Outer Mind,” “Hypnagogic Revelations,” “Twenty Planes of Reality.” This is an album about role-playing, after all, and not just the kind that involves rolling icosahedrons.
The hit single: “Gelatinous Vault of Doom.” This one wins Best Song Title, for sure, but also showcases some solid riffing and the doubled male/female vocals at their finest. Beware!
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