“They yearn for what they fear,” the demon Charon proclaimed upon the shores of the river Acheron, addressing souls of the damned as they awaited their eternal torment in Dante Alighieri’s great allegorical poem of the Middle Ages. Modern times can indeed feel like a long descent into the Inferno, and Charon, that devilish ferryman, honestly nailed it. Because even as we await passage into a second Dark Ages—complete with a feudal economy, private citadels of elites, freelance troubadours, a rise in cultural tribalism, and the anxieties that accompany the collapse of a Great Pax—artists and musicians are appropriating that the period’s look and lore with a yearning nostalgia.
We saw it at Rolling Loud in Orlando, where EsDeeKid invited medieval swordsmen to fight it out on stage; with Yung Lean and his “Forever Young” music video and dark arts back tatts; Florence and the Machine’s “Drink Deep” chamber version; or the Bard Core remixes that continue to sweep across TikTok. The medieval aesthetic is, currently, very in.
[*For artists taking a more traditional approach to the sound, check out our recent piece on Early Music. —Ed.*]
But medieval callbacks are nothing new. The pulp fiction of sword and sorcery has dominated a corner of the contemporary psyche since the days of Conan the Barbarian and D&D game boards, and any Lord of the Rings fan or Skyrim wanderer can attest to its persistent allure.
But what the modern hellscape is revealing is that we are not just participating in medieval fantasies, but entering new, medieval realities. That distinction is what makes this recent rise of underground medieval music so interesting. It’s not just big-budget dress-up. Artists are sticking their hands into the proverbial muck to re-fashion ancestral folk, invent syncretic mythologies, and tinker with mechanical music objects that give this medieval subculture a new level of sincerity and appeal.
There’s Cocanha, who are reviving polyphonic vocal singing from Occitania, that golden triangle between Portugal, Spain, and France—which is also an influence on pop giants like Rosalía. In France, there’s Jazz Lambaux and his bagpipe music on Music for Fools, and MC KER·6 who smashes together Franciscan musical themes with cabaret licks and a healthy dose of Auto-Tune over his trusty hurdy-gurdy. These groups and movements aren’t just doing bedroom cosplay. They’re actually picking up those funny-sounding instruments and running them through today’s illustrious array of software and effect pedals.
There’s also the return of the idea of the joncleur. At the height of the Middle Ages, music was still something that was lived rather than watched, inseparable from daily life. The musician was a wandering craftsman, at one with the people, and would play freely between village carnivals and the court of a lord. But towards the end of the Middle Ages, this changed; as Jacques Attali cleverly points out in Noise: The Political Economy of Music, that shift was a precursor to the greater economic and cultural movements happening across Europe. The joncleur—from the Latin joculare (“to entertain”)—initially a kind of wandering troubadour—became the minstrel. “Afterward, he would have to sell himself entirely and exclusively to a single social class,” Attali notes, “no longer a nomad. He had settled down, attached to a court.” Today, we’re moving in the opposite direction.
When Jazz Lambaux played at Le Sample in Paris on his unplugged tour, there were literally no plugs. Lambaux played the resonator guitar, 300SkullsAndCounting brought a battery-powered keytar (basically a children’s toy), Enora Morice played the Scottish smallpipes, and Lucie Garrigues held the melodica and tin whistle. Together they performed a set of songs into a collection of megaphones. The whole fanfare felt like it could attach to a shopping cart and roll through town. It was a deliberate and folksy tribute to the jocular spirit .
For others, it’s more abstract: Mac Kennedy, leader of Philadelphia punk group Poison Ruïn wrote in notes for their latest album Hymns From the Hills, “I’m not very interested in conveying the historical facts of medieval culture. If we are to make sense of the present, we need to employ a more mythic mode of language and symbol to reach beyond the spiritual malaise that envelopes us. A mythic truth resonates within any time, but its echoes call from outside of time. Medieval and fantasy imagery are simply effective personal starting points for tapping into that mode of communication.”
In that way, medieval lore also provides a kind of antidote, whether it be an escapist fantasy into the world of magic, a political pursuit of local identity in a globalized world, or an act of imagineering for possible futures. That particular epoch is a refreshing vision of virtue and moral certainty that deeply contrasts with the post-modern, relativist malaise. It’s also a conduit for the very human need for magic, mystery, and mysticism that have been robbed from us by the rational successes of Scientific Materialism.
And so, what follows is a full range of medieval inspired sounds from around the world. Each with its own twist on a past lost or perhaps approaching. And maybe, containing in them some magic wisdom on what lies ahead.
Jazz Lambaux references the Middle Ages more in style than in sound. Based between Paris and New York, Lambaux has found inspiration in the image of a fool, the medieval archetype that keeps power on its toes. The songs and performances are decidedly adolescent, goofy, and whimsical. But the choice of instruments and delivery serves as a reminder that sometimes the fool knows much more than he lets on. This “elegy for a demographic with little-to-no property ownership prospects” is exactly the kind of opus Acheron was speaking of. You can listen to the full album, or the unplugged version—released, of course, on April Fool’s Day.
Welcome to the mysterious world of dungeon synth with Magnifique. The genre has been soundtracking tabletop role-playing games since the ‘90s, but the ambient lo-fi aesthetics that would’ve accompanied the dungeon crawlers of the past is being replaced by a sincere effort at live performance and original interpretation. And once again, it’s moving away from “functionary” themes that marked the end of the Middle Ages. Magnifique is anonymous, with limited downloads and tapes, and their music was recorded “in one night, in times unknown.” It is ethereal, non-commodified, candlelight music.
Cocahana reminds us that folklore is a living thing. For Lila Fraysse and Caroline Dufau who make up the group, folklore is neither decoration nor nostalgia. It is a means to construct identity, a tool in political struggle, and architecture for the imagination. It is also a functional reminder: Music is meant to bring us together, make us move, and allow us to revel in the infinite now. The duo can also be seen carrying theTambourin de Béarn (a string drum played with a mallet upon a long zither) on their heads in the album art, a medieval instrument that has helped define their sound. The album was also produced under the guidance of Spanish writer and composer Raül Refree who co-wrote Rosalía’s first album Los Ángeles and is a longtime proponent of ancestral music from Northern Spain.
This is likely your first encounter with a band who describes their style as “chicken synth.” Chronicles of the Mystic Coop is another group shrouded in mystery, whose descriptions are poetic rather than concrete. And while the name might be a bit of a lark, the music itself is deadly serious. Somewhere between shadow waltz and spectral ballet, the album uses medieval melodies and modern percussion to create music where “echoes weave in cosmic elegy.” Both playful and phantasmic, it’s a pagan reminder that all things are alive with mystic potential. Even a chicken.
Gregalih fit nicely in what some have been calling the New-Trad movement, quietly inspiring the experimental underground of Western Europe. The duo combine modal dance, a hurdy-gurdy enhanced with effects, and a DIY string drum, and play them over the crunchy folk repertoires of Bretagne’s famous binioù (a medieval bagpipe meets kazoo). Their hypnotic jams could last for hours and animate the most exciting harvest festivals of days past. And they do just that, at a French festival which bears the name New Trad—a three-day event featuring groups of the same ilk.
DIM is a Nova Scotia group that combines synth and black metal under a medieval guise. This 16-minute track earns its length: It opens with a long dungeon synth passage before screeching into the black metal delirium for which the group is best known. If you ever feel weary, remember their call to arms: “Oh Mound Dwellers, do not let my torchlight go out now, for there is a bloodstorm raging in the deep.”
If the joncleur of the past had synths and drum machines, we’d probably get something like MC KER·6’s work on plusieurs morceaux à la suite(or, several songs in a row). Especially if that troubadour lived in Southern France when it was under the occupation of the Moors, which lasted throughout the 8th and 10th centuries. MC KER·6 radically fuses 808 kicks with a synthetic hurdy-gurdy and sings in the Quercy dialect, a regional variety of the Occitan language alive today primarily thanks to traditional folk songs. It’s a bold artistic enterprise that would fit as nicely in a modern free party as it might a medieval tavern.
The critically acclaimed group Poison Ruïn returns with another work of medieval-themed punk and metal. Far more reminiscent of the ‘80s groups that first attached themselves to the medieval aesthetic, Poison Ruïn is faithfully hardcore and defiantly angry. As lead singer Mac Kennedy puts it, medieval imagery is a tool for new myth-making, and their straightforward style leaves no question as to which champion they’re rooting for in today’s Great Duel.
Milkweed is a duo of folk pranksters known for taking banjos, warped cassettes, and Welsh myths, and combining them with lo-fi and trip-hop musical themes. On their latest project, they’ve chosen to interpret the King Arthur-style Irish epic Táin Bó Cúailnge, as translated by Thomas Kinsella. Táin means “raid,” and the story recounts a great conflict over the stealing of a prize bull—“some sort of strange totem that reflects something very close to the soul of the Irish.” The lo-fi beats and distorted vocals provide the perfect backdrop to immerse listeners in the saga, packed with potent lessons for an era of conflict.