Atlas of Metal: Albania

The Republic of Albania is a small European country just north of Greece. It's estimated they are about 2/3 Muslim, and were until 1990 a Communist state, so you might not expect to find a lot of metal bands there. And you'd be right.

The Metal Archives lists a total of six bands from the country. Only three of them are currently active, none of whom are signed.

Gverr is a progressive death metal band who sound like they're strongly influenced by Death in terms of both musical and vocal style, as well as some influence from more modern technical death metal bands with a more old-school feel like Psycroptic. What I've heard actually sounds like pretty strong (though not groundbreaking) material.



Crossbones is listed as a thrash metal band in the Archives, but they sound more like a 90's garage band who listened to too much groove and nu metal. Almost like they could have been Machine Head, only with a more generic and ineffectual sound. Judge for yourself:



Finally, we have something former Communist states tend to be good for: black metal. Nihil is just that, sounding like fairly typical Eastern European black metal. It's hard to tell whether they have anything new to offer from this video, but they sound good enough that I'd go see them if I ever made it to Albania: