Look out, the next great music sub-genre has arrived and it’s totally unexpected and wonderfully wild: samurai metal. 

Since Black Sabbath first developed heavy metal all those decades ago, varied offshoots have formed. Hair metal? Lovely. Death metal? Sure, why not? We’ve even saw pirate metal and viking metal rise to claim their slice of the market.

Now, as per Loudwire, we have the latest addition. Samurai metal comes to listeners courtesy of Japanese band Gyze and it’s just as mental as you expected/hoped.

Although they’ve been active since 2009, achieving mild success with their 2014 single ‘Desire’, it’s their latest song and video ‘Samurai Metal’ that is set to bring them to a wider audience.

The video is set in a historic Japanese village, the band members resplendent in traditional samurai clothing. Gone are samurai swords though, replaced by their frenetically-wielded guitars. They really get into it.

There are even virtual appearances by some special guests to add levity to proceedings, including DragonForce’s Marc Hudson, Battle Beast, Niles Courbaron from Sirenia, A&P-Reacts, and more.

“I think there is folk metal all over the world. Chinese bands have Chinese sounds and Brazilian bands have Brazilian sounds,” their frontman Ryoji recently told Geki Rock. “I happened to listen to a folk metal playlist and thought, ‘I don’t have a Japanese band.’

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‘Samurai Metal’ was born when I thought about what I would do if I could make a song that could be cut into that hand. This time, I tried to keep everything simple from the title to the lyrics so that everything was stupid.”

“The highlights (of ‘Samurai Metal’) are ‘sayonara’ and ‘konnichiwa,’ which are Japanese,” he continued. “I’d like to scream with everyone over there someday live. I think it’s a song that has an impact immediately after listening to it, so I think it’s a song that can be enjoyed by various people, even if you’re not the only one who listened to metal.”

Only time will tell if samurai metal takes off but one performance is exhilarating enough.

Check out ‘Samurai Metal’ by Gyze:

YouTube VideoPlay

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