Press Kit

Deathbarrel are a country band from Stavanger, Norway. Their slogan — True Norwegian Outlaw Country — borrows the absolutist language of Norwegian black metal and applies it to banjos, pedal steel, baritone vocals and stories of drinking, prison, failure and escape.

Deathbarrel occupy an unusual position in Norwegian music: a country band whose name and label associations belong partly to heavy metal, whose founder emerged from punk, and whose songs look toward the American outlaw tradition without simply reproducing it.

Founder Ottar Stangeland fronted the Stavanger Oi!/punk band Haggis before beginning to write country songs during a 90-day prison sentence. Merciless Winds (CCAP, 2012) established the vocabulary — fiddle, banjo, mandolin, dobro, pedal steel, upright bass — and earned strong regional notices. Rebuke Revoke (Soulseller Records, 2020) developed a darker version of the sound, described by critics as gloomy Americana. The 2024 single “A Classic Christmas Song” extended that logic through the murder-ballad tradition, featuring two-time Norwegian hardingfele champion Aleksander R. Olavsen.

The band remain genuinely underground, and the interest is in the friction between parody and confession: outlaw mythology exaggerated, then complicated by experience real enough to give it weight.

Stage plot, input list, backline requirements and travelling party size are supplied on request via the booking contact.