Runagaldr Is Live

Runagaldr is officially live.

After a lot of building, tweaking, and figuring out exactly what I wanted this place to be, the doors are finally open. This is the start of what I hope becomes a growing archive of music worth talking about.

This site is, first and foremost, a personal metal archive. I built it as a place to write about records I actually want to spend time with, especially releases and bands that are obscure, overlooked, underrated, forgotten, or simply deserving of a little more attention. Metal will be the main focus, but it is not an absolute boundary; if something outside metal catches my attention, it can end up here too.

That means there will probably be a lot of older material here. Some albums were barely noticed when they came out. Some belonged to small scenes, disappeared with their labels or bands, or have simply been buried under twenty years of newer releases. If I find something interesting in that pile, I want Runagaldr to give it another place to exist.

There will absolutely be newer music too. If a new album, EP, demo, or single catches my attention, I may write about it. What Runagaldr is not, however, is an attempt to cover every major metal release the week it drops. There are already plenty of sites doing that, often much better and much faster than one guy with a listening queue ever could.

So there is no release-calendar treadmill here, no quota, and no promise of comprehensive coverage. A huge band releasing a new record does not automatically make it more interesting to me than a forgotten demo from 2004 or a tiny band putting out its first single.

The reviews will follow the same idea. I would rather spend time on music that gives me something to say than manufacture coverage for the sake of keeping a feed busy. Some records will be new discoveries. Others will be albums I have known for years and finally want to revisit properly.

Runagaldr will mostly live somewhere in that space: metal history, personal discovery, obscure corners of the genre, and whatever else I happen to find worth writing about.

That is the plan, anyway. We’ll see where the archive goes from here.