Although their very fine debut, 1997's SOKNARDALR, had already shown a remarkable creative vision and no lack of songwriting maturity, Windir's second album, 1998's ARNTOR, took advantage of lessons learned and much improved production standards to take the group's folk-laden black metal to a whole new level. Setting standards that would hereafter be emulated by numerous extreme metal bands attuned to their native musical traditions (e.g. Romania's Negura Bunget and the Ukraine's Drudkh), ARNTOR was arguably the shot heard 'round the world, as it were -- only that world happened to be the relatively small, reclusive, and tight-knit world of black metal. Nevertheless, the metal-free, accordion-ruled "Byrjing" (The Beginning) and conversely black metal-loaded "Ending" provided suitably opposed bookends, spanning the breadth of what lay between -- much of it as groundbreaking as it was astonishingly easy to absorb. In short, this album's importance in the grand scheme of Scandinavian heavy metal is difficult to overstate, and if Sweden's Bathory were responsible for introducing the Viking metal concept to begin with, then the watershed ARNTOR gave Windir a strong case as heirs to their throne, by showing the way forward for the genre's future disciples.
