A couple weeks ago, I had the pleasure of speaking with Chris Naughton, frontman of Winterfylleth and pioneer of modern pagan black metal. I asked him to draw up a list of five quintessentially English bands/scenes that fed into the Winterfylleth sound. These serve as touchstones for a conversation ranging from details of guitar technique to lyrical source texts to obscure distro history.

On the show, we’ve often characterized Winterfylleth as a kind of tricky folk-cultural transplant project, “English Slavblack.” Talking with Chris led me to revise this portrait: Much of what I attributed to the influence of Ukrainian bands has older roots in Chris’s native soil, in styles I hadn’t necessarily expected. As for the question of English black metal, Chris has a thoughtful answer, a robust rebuttal to the old saw that “there's no such thing as 'English' culture."

00:00 - Intro

3:08 - Peaceville death-doom, songwriting for Winterfylleth

33:22 - Bolt Thrower, Carcass

52:45 - Is there an “English Sound” in black metal? (YES, but it’s not what you think)

1:01:09 - Deep Purple

1:06:40 - Interlude - Iron Maiden - “Blood Brothers” fr. Brave New World (EMI, 2000)

1:13:54 - Fairport Convention, folk ballads, and pastoral poetry

1:30:21 - Primordial, the turn towards pagan black metal

1:43:22 - Drudkh / Hate Forest vs. other Slavic black metal

2:14:00 - Outro - Winterfylleth - “The Insurrection,” fr. The Imperious Horizon (Candlelight, 2024)

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