The Bad Penny (beta)

“It’s much heavier than the stuff we did in the past. Yeah, it’s very brutal, but it’s also mellow and melodic. I love it. I haven’t listened to any other band since we recorded this, because it’s so amazing. It’s the best thing I’ve ever recorded.”
-former Amon Amarth and current Fimbul Winter drummer Niko Kaukinen.

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Fans of Scandinavian melodic death metal are notoriously persnickety. That’s particularly the case when it comes to evaluating whether a band in the narrow yet revered sub-subgenre has “sold out” over the years. The criterion is pretty straightforward: Has the band strayed from the raw, grisly production sound that characterized the first recordings by In Flames, Dissection, At the Gates, Dark Tranquillity and Dismember in favor of a more polished or – gasp! – mainstream sensibility.

If you consider yourself a devotee of MDM from the aforementioned locale in northern Europe, you may have noticed a key contributor to the rise of the subgenre missing from the last sentence: Amon Amarth. While perhaps more singularly responsible than another other Scandinavian death-metal act for getting Americans and others hooked on meth – oops, we mean melodeth – they, like many of the other progenitors, have taken a licking and even faced threats of getting exiled from the community they helped cultivate in the first place.