(photo by Matthieu Fabert)

EDITOR’S PREFACE: Gemma Alexander is a Seattle writer and NCS fan who visited Iceland this fall, timing her visit to coincide with the Iceland Airwaves festival. While in Iceland, Gemma generously arranged to conduct interviews of some Icelandic bands for NCS. So far, we’ve posted her interviews of Angist, Beneath, Kontinuum, Sólstafir., and Gone Postal.

Today we give you Gemma’s interview of Skálmöld’s Snæbjörn Ragnarssonin. Gemma wasn’t able to catch up with the band in Iceland, and we thank them for agreeing to do this one by e-mail. Except for the photo above, Gemma also took all the pics that accompanying her interview.

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Throughout the ages, the greatest minds in metal have sought a satisfactory definition for the term “Viking metal.” It seemed that their best efforts were doomed to be fruitless when Amon Amarth, the one band universally agreed to belong to the genre, went on record with this statement:

“We play death metal. We write about Vikings so, therefore, some refer us to Viking metal, but I have no idea what that is. I can’t imagine the Vikings were into metal at all except on the swords and stuff. And musically, I guess they only played these strange lip instruments and some bongos or whatever.”

—The Metal Web’s interview with Johan Hegg Continue reading »