Some riffs whisper. This one kicks down the door, drinks your mead and challenges the fridge to single combat. Amon Amarth's The Pursuit of Vikings is 43 seconds of me convincing my low B string that it, too, once raided a monastery.
This clip runs through the main riffs of the song on guitar — the galloping palm-muted engine and the soaring melodic death metal harmony bolted on top. It's the sound of a Viking longship, if the longship were also a metronome that hates you.
How the Pursuit of Vikings riff actually works
First, the boring-but-crucial part: tuning. The song lives in B standard (B–E–A–D–F#–B), so your lowest string drops a whole fourth below normal E. That fat, floppy low B is the entire personality of the riff — it's why it sounds like a battle and not a jingle. The main figure is a palm-muted gallop on that open B string, and the secret is in the picking hand: keep the heel of your palm parked on the strings near the bridge and drive it with a down–down–up eighth-note gallop. Lock that to a metronome slowly, because "epic" collapses into "mud" the instant your gallop gets sloppy. If palm muting feels alien, my Palm Mutes breakdown is the place to start.
Then comes the "melodic" in melodic death metal: over that low churn, Amon Amarth stack a memorable minor-key melody, and much of their signature grandeur is just that melody harmonised in thirds — one guitar plays the tune, the other shadows it a third higher. That's the same trick behind a lot of "epic" metal, and you can hear the harmony math up close in my Symphony X thirds clip. Concrete takeaway: nail the gallop rhythm first, add the melody second, harmonise last — in that order.
Do it right and you'll feel legally obligated to stare into the middle distance like you're watching a fjord. Do it wrong and you've invented a very angry sewing machine. Want the PDF and Guitar Pro file so you can raid at your own tempo? It's all on my Patreon.