Why Vildhjarta is the best metal band of the decade

Collin R. Vogt
Mar 6, 2017
9 min read

People are often surprised when I tell them that I am a fervent metal fan, particularly the sub-genres of death metal and djent (which, if you are unaware, came about as an onomatopoeia for the type of guitar playing usually used by djent bands). But yes, I am a huge fan of metal, and no band has held my interest as deeply or for a longer period of time, and also with a smaller catalogue of music to draw from, than Vildhjarta.

Vildhjarta is always compared to Mesghuggah, the forefathers of the djent genre, but this connection is thin. I feel that these two bands could not be more different. Perhaps I have a practiced ear when it comes to metal, but there are a few key differences in the two bands musical styles.

"Dagger" - Vildhjarta

The first difference is expressiveness. Meshuggah's greatest weakness as a band (and let me just say, they're my second favorite behind Vildhjarta) is their inability to create an emotional tone in their songs. Listening to Meshuggah is like taking a jackhammer to the face, and that's awesome. But the effect of their music is actually very muting in an emotional sense. It's so relentless, rhythmically aggressive, and consistent, that there is little room left for the listener to consider the purpose of the song itself. Meshuggah has great riffs and they are unquestionably talented musicians, but I feel that their music is driven purely by creative and musical ideas than it is by emotional expression. And that's fine. There's room for both types of bands in any genre of music, metal or otherwise.

Vildhjarta, however, is much more impassioned in it's delivery than Meshuggah, and as a result, often feels more organic than Meshuggah, subversively so. Vildhjarta, particularly on their album Masstaden, carries that special quality that a few legendary metal albums have, like Rust in Peace, Angel of Death, and Master of Puppets, where the songs feel so cohesive, natural, and expressive, that it feels as though the band sat down, started playing, channeled the music from another dimension, and an hour later had the whole album finished. Like the Birkin Bag, the seams are so well hidden, you forget it was meticulously crafted over a long period of time. With Meshuggah, you can easily see the musicians through their music, meticulously crafting and tweaking their time signatures and riffs, creating it in an almost scientific fashion. While this creates technically brilliant music, it unfortunately has the effect of making it sound a bit soulless. Their musical goals and their decisions about how to achieve them are so obvious that you can easily imagine them writing and rewriting and occasionally overcomplicating the songs. In contrast, the greatest level of art actually obscures the artist. You cannot sense their deliberation and decision-making through their art; the art itself feels natural, more discovered than crafted.

This is where Vildhjarta excels. It doesn't feel like their particular style had to be carefully developed over nearly six years, but it was. I was shocked to hear that the band was founded in 2005, but didn't release their first album until 2011. The reason for my is that Masstaden exudes confidence. It doesn't feel like an album that was tinkered with for over half a decade (Chinese Democracy, anyone?). Often, the result of albums, films, and indeed, any art, that has been worked on for such a long period of times is a bit quibbling. Some ideas are presented, but not deeply explored or are quickly abandoned, because the artist doesn't trust themselves enough to fully break from the mold, or perhaps because they during the long period of time the album was being worked on, the artists themselves changed, and the music becomes directionless. Vildhjarta, however, sound cohesive and purposeful. They expertly present their creative additions to the genre, mainly being dissonance, atonality, and non-repetitiveness, without ever sounding half-baked.

The lack of repetition is what really grabbed me, and keeps me coming back to them. While the dissonance and atonality points play a big part in their performance style, the non-repetitiveness really has to do with their songwriting and their resulting musical structure as a whole, and this is why it is the most important. Many djent bands fall into the trap of picking a pattern, and repeating it over and over again. A perfect example of this is "Bleed" by Meshuggah: while there are a few variations, the thrust of the song is two 32nd notes followed by two 16th notes. It creates a feeling of imbalance because this pattern does not fit an equal number of times in one measure of the music and carries over across several measures until the beginning of the riff hits the "1" of the beat. While it feels imbalanced, it's actually fairly repetitive, and comes across almost mathematically. This is called syncopation. By stretching a riff or phrase into a three or four measure cycle, bands create a feeling of randomness and a manufactured incomprehensibility. But, after listening to a song 3 or 4 times, you recognize the patterns, the cycle of repetition, and the novelty begins to wear off. It's still interesting to listen to; that's not my complaint. "Bleed" is basically the same idea from beginning to end, except for a short respite, although I'm not sure that section was decided upon for artistic reasons, or merely to give the musicians a rest from the enormously demanding pace of the song.

"Bleed" - Meshuggah

"Shadow" - Vildhjarta

Anyways, my problem with syncopation is that this technique seeks to create a air of originality that is not always earned. Don't get me wrong, there are innumerable examples of syncopation being used to create brilliant and memorable riffs, like, for example, in Veil of Maya's song "Punisher", or on Hacktivist's "Elevate". However, this technique in and of itself is no more advanced or challenging than traditional riffing techniques as seen in thrash metal legends like Metallica and Megadeth. The latter, especially, is adept at creating melodic tension, an internal drive latent in the music, pushing towards a resolution, which is essentially the same effect of syncopation, so prevalent in the modern era of metal bands. Your ear, whether trained in music or not, is expecting a resolution, and through the denial of it, for however many measures the riff or phrase may take, the artist creates tension. It's like a good action scene in a movie - you know, logically, the hero is going to survive, but you're able to ignore the logical side of your brain and give yourself over to the emotion of the scene, relating to the heroes struggle.

Syncopation is not "cheap"; it has it's place in music, along with every other technique. But my opinion is that it is often incorrectly used to establish a sense of complexity at the expense of flow. A perfect example of this is from After The Burial's song "My Frailty". The song frequently shifts between disparate riffs that don't have any thematic relationship to each other. Even worse, there is no transition between the riffs. One phrase ends, and then another immediately begins. Now again, this technique can be used to great affect, primarily to present two different emotional states, in sharp contrast. This is, however, NOT how After The Burial approaches the song. Each idea presented is completely divorced from the next, which makes the song as a whole feel less cohesive and coherent.

"My Frailty" - After The Burial

Vildhjarta's riffs, on the other hand, almost never repeat themselves. The tone and instrumentation is consistent, but throughout the whole phrase (to be clear, a phrase is basically a musical sentence), the same series of notes is never played more than once in the same rhythmic pattern. They may repeat the phrase as a whole once or twice, but while still managing to eschew traditional song structures. Vildhjarta creates the same feeling of tension and uncertainty in the listener, but in a more organic and natural fashion, through subversion of expectation and a manipulation of current songwriting tropes. It doesn't feel quite so "crafted" as the previous examples do, and that is because the overall flow of the song is more respect, as opposed to individual riffs and ideas. Their songs appear to be following a complex path, rather than a repetitive circle, which often happens in less innovative bands that use a verse-chorus method. It's beautifully difficult to wrap your mind around a Vildhjarta song, and this is absolutely to the credit of the songwriters. Each time you listen to the song, you'll catch a new detail, and you never remember quite how it will end until you get there, because you go through many different emotional situations throughout the course of the song. The breadth of material contained in just one album is larger than some bands will achieve across multiple albums, and the intricacies in each song make Masstaden as a whole infinitely re-listenable.

"All These Feelings" - Vildhjarta

Nowhere is this musical diversity and non-repetitiveness more successfully accomplished than in the song "All These Feelings", which happens to be my favorite on the record. The first and last phrases of the song are thematically related, and the conclusion of the song feels like a natural progression of the ideas presented in the opening section, like a question and an answer. Both sections use the same concepts of atonality and rhythmic space to suggest a similarity, while the melodic thrust presents an introduction versus a conclusion, with the end featuring more staccato riffing and short stops, creating tension, while the intro holds on particular notes and stretches and shrinks their length throughout the phrase. The result is masterful. The riffs have an emotional weight, and feel both deliberate and natural at the same time, rather than contrived and forced, as is the case in some modern djent bands. The lyrics feel less like an afterthought, and more like an integral layer of the song. Part of this comes as a result of having two vocalists, which I have never seen before in metal, allowing them to layer their vocals, which creates a very "thought-like" sound, like when you're brain is going so fast that you haven't finished mulling over one idea before the next comes barging in.

Vildhjarta succeeds in creating a complete musical landscape, a feat which exceeds the reach of many modern bands, metal or otherwise. No tool is over abused or underdeveloped. Vildhjarta expertly blends melodies with pounding, obliterating riffing, and a clean-tone background harmony is often juxtaposed against harsh, atonal scratching and unconventional guitar techniques that sometimes sound more like screams than notes.

This leads me into my other point about what differentiates Vildhjarta from other, similar bands. As stated above, Vildhjarta frequently makes use of atonal "sounds" - you can't really even call them notes - to add diverse tones and colors to what would otherwise be traditional - yet still satisfying - sounding riffs. Again, these are not merely notes that exist outside the key the song is played in, these are sounds that do not even appear in any scale, and are in fact barely discernible as musical at all, if they were to be heard outside the context of the songs in which they are heard. These tones include heavily muted chugs, high-gain squeals, pinch harmonics, and scratching. They use these tones to create dissonance in the song, which in turn creates tension in the listener: this is not a sound we are used to hearing, and it puts us on the edge of our seat, hoping to hear it resolve effectively. In the hands of a less skilled group of writers, it would probably be entirely frustrating to listen to; it would be likely be forcibly injected and overused, subject to the law of diminishing returns. However, in Vildhjarta's hands, these tones are used to accent and complicate already interesting songs, which is due to the varied pacing, the complex but successfully intertwined thematic relationships, and the clear flow of the music as a whole. They add another layer to the song and do not appear to be used as merely a forced attempt to sound "new", but actually appear as surprising accents in the riffs, deftly creating a wholly unique tonal statement that otherwise could not be created. In other words, the techniques used feel necessitated and justified by the musical direction of the song.

Compare this to Meshuggah. Now, Meshuggah has great transitions, awe-inspiring technicality, and thick tension. They also make use of syncopation, as well as polyrhythms, which is a technique where two different rhythms are played at the same time, to dazzling effect, a occassionally have understated but blazing guitar solos, something which Vidhjarta does not utilize. However, there is one shortcoming in Meshuggah's music: it is often quite repetitive. So much so that the music can actually, surprisingly, have a numbing effect on the listener. It somehow manages to lack an aggression, and this is, in my opinion, because the music is overly crafted. It lacks a rawness, a pure, clear emotional statement, that makes the music more purposeful. While I have no doubt that Vildhjarta's music is just as deliberately composed as Meshuggah's, the important difference is that Vildhjarta's style is such that it doesn't sound deliberate. It sounds more natural, more unique, and more personal. If Meshuggah is baroque, then Vildhjarta is romantic - the former being more concerned with technical expression, the latter with creating an emotional experience. I don't think listening to Vildhjarta is going to inspire the next generation of guitar plays, because the objective of their music isn't to dazzle or impress, but to communicate feeling, and they do this excellently.

"Traces" - Vildhjarta

Vildhjarta is one of those bands that can be difficult to analogize. The places they draw inspiration from are clear, but they imbue each component of their music with a visionary and unique identity. They have the rhythmic complexity of Meshuggah, the same ability to create an atmospheric environment as Opeth, the juxtapositions between clean and aggressive riffs of Tesseract, and the emotional clarity of Whitechapel or Thy Art is Murder, and yet they don't really sound like any of these bands. I've never heard an album that manages to intertwine so many aspects of songwriting so successfully and with such originality. The master's mark is the ability to make something difficult sound simple, and Vildhjarta are masters, indeed.

And yeah, I have a thall sticker on the back of my laptop.