folk metal

In Extremo is one of the most famous folk metal bands, originating from Berlin, Germany in 1995. The band's musical style combines heavy metal with medieval traditional songs, blending the sound of the standard metal instruments with traditional instruments such as the bagpipes, harp, hurdy-gurdy and shawm. Versions of well-known traditional/medieval ballads make up the main part of their repertoire, though over the years the band has also begun to write some original material using the German language.

Read more about In Extremo on Last.fm.

Darkwave/Gothic Rock band formed in Karlsruhe, Germany in 1993 by Johannes Berthold. Scarcely another band among the German-speaking Alternative /(Dark)Wave-scene has polarized media and audience within the last eighteen years as much as ILLUMINATE. Either praised up to the skies or torn apart as „Schlager“ (a German derogatory term for bad pop songs) – be that as it may, for the last decade, Jo-hannes Berthold and his band have left their mark on the Dark scene...

Battlelore is an epic fantasy metal band from Lappeenranta, Finland. Their style takes elements from many different heavy metal subgenres, including folk, power, gothic metal and even some industrial in the mix. All of Battlelore's lyrics specifically revolve around people and events in J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle-earth. Their albums also revolve around the series of books. From their first album to the last actually speaks of events and chapters in the books in a chronological order.

One weekend in 2004, in Oslo, Norway, a bunch of goons became bored with the selection of party music that was available to them, and, helped along by the consumption of large quantities of alcohol, the soon-to-be members of TrollfesT decided to take matters into their own hands. One website and six songs later, a German label, which at the time was called Solistium, recognised the potential in the madness and got in touch.