Mongolian Band Plays Heavy Metal with Traditional Folk Instruments and Throat Singing

Over in Mongolia, a folk metal band called The Hu have been inventing what they call “Hunnu Rock,” a style combining Western headbanging with instruments like the horsehead fiddle (morin khuur) and Mongolian guitar (tovshuur). “It also involves singing in a guttural way,” Katya Cengel points out at NPR—no, not like this, but in the manner of traditional Mongolian throat singers.

Now YouTube sensations with millions of views of its two videos for  “Yuve Yuve Yu” and “Wolf Totem,” the band plans to release its first  album this spring, after seven years of hard work. The Hu are not  flash-in-the-pan internet fame seekers but serious musicians who didn’t  quite expect this degree of attention, or so they say. “When we do  this,” said guitarist Temka, “we try to spiritually express this  beautiful thing about Mongolian music. We think we will talk to  everyone’s soul through our music. But we didn’t expect this fast,  people just popping up everywhere.”

Scroll down to watch them in action.

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