“Viking Death March” by Billy Talent

Billy Talent had to make fans wait for their fourth album, Dead Silence, so they handed over "Viking Death March" first. In mid-May 2012 the band posted a video pushing the record back to the fall from a tentative July date while promising a new song before the month was out; a teaser followed, and on May 25 the full track landed on SoundCloud as the album's first single.

Credited to the whole band, it's a strange hybrid by their standards: Exclaim!'s Gregory Adams heard their usual post-hardcore licks fused with new wave of British heavy metal, all in 6/8 time. The video, directed by Michael Maxxis and David Hogan, stitches together live footage from Rock am Ring in Nürburg, Germany and the Melkweg in Amsterdam, both shot that June.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.