Why This “Angry” Song Is So Weirdly Feel-Good… (2024)

Well, I thought that I’d talk briefly about music today. This is mostly because, on New Year’s Day, I found myself listening to the history-themed metal song “Saxons And Vikings” (2023) (warning – “explicit lyrics”). A collaboration between the Swedish Viking-themed melodic death metal band Amon Amarth and the long-running British heavy metal band Saxon, this is… bizarrely… much more of a “feel-good” song than it has any right to be.

On paper, it’s an incredibly bloodthirsty and aggressive song, telling a historical story about the Saxons and the Vikings fighting each other for control of ancient England (if I remember the history correctly, they each ended up with about half of it – “Wessex” in the south and the “Danelaw” in the north – until the Normans invaded from France in 1066 and took all of it. On a side-note: This is why some places in northern England still have vaguely Scandinavian-sounding names – like Whitby, York [derived from “Yorvik”] etc...).

Each band plays the side you would expect them to and they spend the entire song alternately singing about how they can never be at peace and insulting/threatening each other. And you’d expect to feel bad after listening to this song, but – again – it’s weirdly feel-good for so many reasons. Why?

In short, it’s a song of ironies and contrasts. Firstly, despite the war-like theme of the song, both bands are clearly friends with each other because – well – they literally wrote a song together. In fact, the whole song seems to have been written to celebrate both bands. Not only that, most of the insults have such a hilariously old-fashioned and melodramatic style – like “You spineless dogs!” – that they are more amusing than frightening, like two friends having a playful argument with each other. Like the insult duels in those classic pirate-themed adventure games I’ve never gotten round to playing.

Secondly, there’s the contrast between the vocal styles. Johann Hegg’s growled death metal vocals are paired with Biff Byford’s shrill traditional metal vocals in this way that is an absolute joy to listen to. Not only does this add a lot of extra “texture” to the song, but it also feels less like a traditional duet but more like two awesome metal bands meeting each other and hanging out together. Each band gets to show off their unique “style” but in a way that – despite the song’s theme – isn’t “competitive”, but instead collaborative. And the song becomes something greater than the sum of its parts.

Thirdly, there’s the moral point and apolitical nature of the song. The Viking characters are pagan and the Saxon characters are Christian, but both are shown to be just as cruel and belligerent as each other. It makes a point about human nature, about how any ideology or religion leads to evil when taken to an extreme.

And this is also refreshing because, as cool as Viking-themed metal is, it’s one of those genres where – these days- you usually have to carefully read the lyrics and/or research the band due to the unfortunate (and historically ignorant) trend of Viking-themed stuff being misused by the far-right. Seriously, history is not their strong point. Case in point: They would probably have an existential crisis if they looked at a picture of “Cheddar Man“, the very first person known to have lived in Britain….

Fourthly, it’s also weirdly refreshing to hear a metal song about Vikings which isn’t entirely from the perspective of the Vikings. This is a chronically under-used theme in metal and, possibly due to the history, it only seems to show up in metal songs from the island of Great Britain. Seriously, I can literally only think of two or three other songs which do this.

Whether it is Iron Maiden’s 1982 song “Invaders” (and their earlier late 1970s song “Invasion”) which presents the Vikings as outright villains, cruelly raiding ancient Britain. Or whether it is the hilariously silly 2011 song “Back Through Time” by Alestorm, about pirates travelling back in time to fight the Vikings. On a side-note: The Viking-themed band Turisas released a song in 2011 called “Hunting Pirates” which tells the other side of this ridiculous sci-fi story. Still, it’s weirdly refreshing to hear a song which isn’t entirely from the perspective of the Viking characters.

Finally, it’s just one of those gloriously theatrical “because its cool” songs which seems to tap into the underlying essence and traditions of the metal genre 🙂 Like, yes, there has always been “serious” metal which expresses emotions in an earnest way or makes serious points about the world. But the genre also has a hilariously theatrical element to it too – even the very first heavy metal album, Black Sabbath’s 1970 self-titled debut, includes gleefully melodramatic horror movie imagery alongside serious anti-war songs. So, it’s always fun to hear metal songs which don’t take themselves 100% seriously.

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Anyway, I hope that this was interesting \m/ 🙂 \m/