This could be dungeon synth's big, embarrassing breakthrough
Thanks, Crawly the TikTok Wizard
Curses were scrawled across everything of value in medieval Europe. One of them, I suspect, said: “May dungeon synth, a genre so underground its Wikipedia page doesn’t cover anything past 1994, go mainstream”. For lo, the devil saluted, and ushered forth the Green Mall Wizard TikToks.
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If you haven’t seen these videos by @crawly_possessed, they’re all largely the same. A man in a green wizard cape squats down and skitters around a Warsaw mall, brandishing a pink aquarium net at employees or passersby until they become visibly uncomfortable. The footage is sped up for added absurdity, and set to the foreboding dungeon synth tones of “Misanthrop”, by Blod Besvimelse.
The first video was posted on June 27th, and currently has almost 23 million views. Later videos have 99 million, 89 million, and so on. They’re popular.
Dungeon synth is exactly what you’d expect: faux-medieval, very lo-fi electronic music that sounds like a premonition of Elden Ring’s most depressing dungeons. It’s usually described as an offshoot of dark ambient, having been heavily influenced by acts like Dead Can Dance, who combined synths with classical-style melodies. The other major ingredient is black metal. Several of its early pioneers, like Mortiis and Satyr/Wongraven, were black metal musicians who launched synth-based side projects or added electronic elements to their metal work.
It’s worth saying that some of dungeon synth’s notable figures are white supremacists. Burzum’s late ‘90s dark ambient albums were influential on the genre, and they were recorded while the project’s sole member was in prison for murder and arson. He has since been arrested for preparing to commit neo-Nazi terrorist acts. Does every dungeon synth musician share these views? No. But some do.
Dungeon synth has never been famous enough to get even a modicum of press. In the mid-2010s, it made a handful of headlines due to its growing representation on platforms like Bandcamp. (I myself was first introduced to it by this 2017 primer of Bandcamp releases.) It also saw a minor uptick in listeners from the 2019-2020 advent of comfy synth, a daughter genre that uses dungeon synth instrumentation to essentially evoke the atmosphere of Frog and Toad. But for the most part, it’s remained unnoticed off major streaming services, and it’s hilariously difficult to find detailed information on most of its artists.
“Misanthrop” is obscure even by dungeon synth standards. The song is not on Spotify, and it only made its way to TikTok after the black metal fan account @trollm_disippel uploaded it last November. (Because of this, the audio for Crawly the Wizard’s videos is still listed as belonging to @trollm_disippel, rather than Blod Besvimelse.)
Blod Besvimelse, the act behind it, was a project helmed by the late German musician Sandra “Melse” Bettinger. Bettinger is (somewhat) better known as part of the ‘90s black metal band Grausamkeit; her then-husband, Andreas “B.S.o.D.” Bettinger, was both her bandmate in Grausamkeit and a contributor to Blod Besvimelse.
The song “Misanthrop” originally appeared on a split demo with B.S.o.D.’s other band Heroin Makes Happy in 1999, and began migrating to YouTube after its release on a Blod Besvimelse compilation in 2017. Several dungeon synth and black metal-related accounts have uploaded a version in the last few years, although none of them seem to have achieved viral success before Crawly. The most popular videos still have less than 600,000 views, and are largely filled with recent comments like “crawly the wizard brought me here”.
Does this mean Crawly could be dungeon synth’s big, stupid breakthrough? I want to say yes, because it would be very funny to see a genre built on edgy high medieval aspirations forever stuck to a guy annoying retail workers in a wizard hat. And medieval nonsense is having something of an online moment lately, with popular memes like wizardposting (which I assume Crawly derives from) and “unfortunately, you are maidenless”.
More seriously, the same post-2020-ish period has seen a rise in popularity for “amplified history” artists. (This is a phrase the Viking neofolk band Heilung uses to describe themselves, but it’s so useful I’m going to steal it and start generalizing.) The idea is to meld traditional folk music and lyrics with rock/metal arrangements, creating a visceral, morbid imagined past.
Amplified history has never been dungeon synth-level obscure. The face of Viking neofolk, Wardruna, has been going strong since 2009, and probably everyone on Tumblr in 2014 saw that video of Eivør performing “Trøllabundin”. In other musical traditions, the Tuvan/Siberian throat-singing rock bands Huun-Huur-Tu and Yat-Kha have been around (and well-received in the West) since the early 1990s. There’s a through-line back to the ‘80s/‘90s new-age music boom, and the neo-medieval groups that found success from it like Mediæval Bæbes. And going back even further, you could point to “world music” pioneers Le Mystère des Voix Bulgares or the incorporation of folk music by 19th century composers like Chopin, Dvořák, and Grieg.
But the last few years have been particularly good to amplified history. Wardruna’s Einar Selvik wrote much of the soundtrack for Assassin’s Creed Valhalla and its expansions in 2020, and won a Grammy for it. Heilung presumably hopes to match that, having soundtracked this year’s Senua’s Saga: Hellblade II. Yat-Kha was featured in an iPhone commercial in 2023. Mongolian folk metal band The Hu’s début singles went viral in 2019, and now they’re opening for Iron Maiden and hearing their music in Star Wars games. Lankum’s 2023 album False Lankum received glowing reviews and a Mercury Prize nomination for its mix of Irish folk and experimental rock. And my father now knows who many of these artists are without my input, which is the main barometer of rock success to me.
In this context, a breakthrough looks possible for the medieval European fantasy of dungeon synth. But — and this is a massive, very obvious caveat — TikTok is a graveyard of short-lived fads.
It would be really funny, though.
Please comment or fact-check me! I am not a dungeon synth fan.