Every Friday, for 35 straight weeks, the AI:Underground community has gathered for a listening party — four hours of the best music in the AI scene, played live over Discord and Twitch.

The voice running the room belongs to Vikingur.

Inside AI:U, he's an institution: an admin, an artist, the host whose sessions have become a defining pillar of the community's culture. The persona is epic by design — Norse, dark, carved in runes and drum thunder.

What's less known, until you ask, is the rest of him.

His real name is Doruk Mezde. He's 24, a university student in Türkiye, studying German Translation and Interpretation at Ege University, one of the country's leading schools. He’s a self-described language nerd who taught himself English at 11. He grew up in a culturally diverse family in the land that bridges West and East, raised on his mother's Metallica and Nirvana records.

"You could say I'm a very curious person who spends his day trying to blend ancient vibes with future sounds," he says. "It's a constant grind between the library and the digital studio, but I wouldn't have it any other way."

Vikingur sat down with Zinstrel to talk about his story, his music, and what it means to be an AI artist.

'We-king-oor'

We start with the name, because everyone gets it wrong — both the pronunciation and the assumption.

Víkingur is Icelandic for, unsurprisingly, viking. It's pronounced "Wee-king-oor." The identity behind it goes back a decade. At 14, Marvel’s Thor movies sent him down late-night internet rabbit holes that led to the actual Norse sources. He followed the mythology into Swedish, then Icelandic. The words, the languages, the lore — all of it was like home to him.

"It felt weirdly natural, like I'd spoken them in a past life," he says. "The weight and the rhythm of the words just clicked."

At 18 came his first Norse tattoo, on his shoulder. More followed.

"I was no longer just decorating my thoughts with Norse mythology," he says. "I was literally carving this identity into my life."

But with the viking identity comes preconceptions about the kind of music he makes.

"People see the name 'Vikingur' and immediately assume I'm just doing Viking folk or metal clichés,” he says. “I wanted to kill that trope."

What the name actually carries, in his telling, is a mindset — the grind, the resilience, the drummer at the front of the longship keeping everyone rowing.

"To me, it's more than a stage name. It's the bridge between the ancient history I love and respect and the future sounds I create."

The bar at 7 a.m.

Mezde’s AI music origin story started in silence. During the summer of 2024, he was working part-time at a bar to earn extra cash, arriving at 7 a.m. to clean the place while it was dead empty — just him and his thoughts about what his future could look like.

One morning, a close friend messaged him on Discord: "Hey, check this out! I made a meme song."

He clicked the Suno link to find a hilarious rap track that roasted everyone in their friend group. But the production quality of the AI model’s output stopped him cold.

"Before that, my AI knowledge was surface-level,” he recalls, “and I definitely didn't think it could handle high-quality music.”

He'd always had the urge to create. What he didn't have was the money. He'd grown up athletic — a self-described jack of all trades in sports until a shoulder injury forced a pivot toward the thing that had always been underneath: rhythm. But for a student in Turkey, the traditional path into music was gate-kept. Studios, session musicians, albums. All of that was a distant dream.

"Then Suno showed up like a gift from the heavens and basically asked, 'Do you want to bring your vision to life, right now?' I didn't just jump at the opportunity. I dove in headfirst. That was the moment I realized I could finally be the architect of my own sound."

He started creating and hasn’t looked back.

A drummer's ear

The phrase that unlocks the whole Vikingur sound is one he uses about himself: Viking drummer mindset.

He's a drummer at heart with an e-kit in the corner of his room that he plays almost every day. And it shows up in the music in the most literal way possible: on his most locked-in days, he records his own drum patterns and uploads them to Suno as the foundation of a track.

"Building an entire track around a live foundation I created myself is a game changer," he says. "It allows me to bridge the gap between my physical world and my AI-driven vision."

The output is what he calls genre-bending with a fixed blueprint. The foundation is always metal and hard rock — the source of the dark, menacing energy in every track. But on top of that, anything goes: Turkish Art Music colliding with progressive metal and dark electronic. Synthwave and R&B detours that still carry the metal grit in the vocals. His way, he says, of nodding to his roots while keeping the Viking edge.

The lyrics are entirely his — every word, every emotion.

His process starts when life throws a punch — and he's blunt that it usually does. He purges everything onto paper first. Pages of raw, destructive thoughts until the energy runs out. Then comes what he calls the surgical part: analyzing, revising, categorizing the rants into a cohesive story until they start feeling like songs.

Only then does he touch a prompt.

"For me, the initial AI output is never the 'final' song. It's just a raw block of marble. My aim is to carve the 'Vikingur' identity out of it."

He iterates relentlessly — stitching the bridge of one generation to the breakdown of another, uploading his own raw vocals, sometimes uploading a recording of himself screaming until the emotion is spent. If a track couldn't be played back-to-back with a progressive metal record, it isn't finished.

"I treat AI as a high-tech instrument, not a shortcut."

The songs he can't listen to

Ask Vikingur to name his most essential tracks and he gives you three: "Left To Bleed,""BLACKENED ECLIPSE." and "Underground."

Then he tells you he dreads hearing them.

"Every time they start, I'm back in those moments, watching my own traumas play out like a movie reel. It's heavy, and yeah, it usually ends in tears. But that's exactly why they're the most authentic 'Vikingur' tracks in my catalog. They aren't just songs to me; they're scars that I carry."This is the contradiction at the center of the project. The persona is armor — cool, powerful, mythic. The music exists to break it open.

"Behind the epic, legendary persona of Vikingur, there is a person named Doruk who has felt unloved, cast aside like trash, and discriminated against," he says. "I want them to look past the aesthetic and truly empathize with the human being behind the mask."

For Vikingur, a track isn't finished when it sounds right. It's finished when it can wreck its own creator.

"If a song can do that to me, then I know it's finally finished."

RECRUDESCENCE

All of it converges on the album he's finishing now: RECRUDESCENCE.

The word means the recurrence of something painful after a dormant period. The record is exactly that — born from the collapse of a four-year relationship, written across weeks he spent disconnected from the world, sitting alone in a café for hours, crying and filling pages with lyrics.

The scope is the most ambitious of his career: 15 tracks. Eight collaborations with artists from the AI:Underground community. More than ten genres. Over five months of work. Every lyric human-written. His own raw vocals layered throughout.

A "Suno ready" version sits on his profile as a sneak peek, but he's emphatic that the final release is a different beast — remastered, re-layered, with music videos in the works.

"This album is designed to hit you like a truck from A to Z," he says. "It is a symphony for the lost and the longing: Desiderium meum, cruciatus meus."

My longing, my torment.

The family that saved him

The collaborations on RECRUDESCENCE aren't networking or career-building team-ups. They're family — and Vikingur means that in the least casual way possible.

"AI:Underground is more than just a community to me," he says. "It's the community that actually saved my life. When I was at my lowest, they reached out and gave me a second wind. Every track I produce today is, in a way, thanks to them."

He serves as the community's Overnight Admin alongside Co-founders Ghost Ryder and Vicky (Vvxn) — a mentor he calls a big brother, and a big sister who never lost faith in him. His track "BOUND.," a collaboration with Vvxn, features his vocals completely raw, no effects.

The listening parties started by accident about a year ago, when he and Zalixor (The Sound Fungus) hopped into a Discord voice chat to play some tunes. People joined. Interest grew. Now, 35 weeks into the official weekly run, the sessions anchor the community's calendar — and his own.

"I still get that same first-day excitement and passion every time I host a session," he says.

The community work keeps expanding: he's led major AI:U events including a 24-hour charity stream benefiting St. Jude Children's Research Hospital.

"My heart beats for AI:Underground, and it always will."

The line is emotion

Vikingur has heard the word slop. He's not a fan.

"I think it's a label born out of prejudice and a lack of understanding from people who are just anti-AI," he says. "Music has a million different forms, and every single one is art in its own space."

His read on the moment is historical. People protested drum machines and beat pads once; now they define the mainstream. AI music, he believes, is on the same path.

But he does draw a line, just not where the critics draw it.

"The real line is drawn by emotion. It's not about the tools, it's about the soul behind them. You can usually tell when a track was made just to chase a trend versus when an artist poured their entire reality into it."

The biggest misconception about AI artists, he says, is “The Button.” The prompt itself.

"People think it's a shortcut. The AI doesn't know about my 4-year relationship ending. It doesn't know the specific rhythm of my Viking drummer mindset, and it certainly doesn't feel the agony I pour into my notebook. We aren't just 'prompting.' We are curating, designing, and carving out an identity. AI is the instrument, but the heart behind the music is 100% human."

After RECRUDESCENCE drops, he's planning to retreat — not to stop, but to discover. Maybe a year of EPs built quietly behind the scenes, dropped all at once as a surprise. In a scene obsessed with output velocity, the patience is its own statement.

He has a line for where he thinks all this is headed. It might be the most Vikingur sentence ever spoken:

"I am not the inventor of a new genre. I am the new era."

Vikingur hosts the AI:Underground Listening Party every Friday, 1:30–5:30 p.m. EDT. Find him on Suno, Spotify, and YouTube as Vikingur, or on Discord as Mezdesson — his DMs are open.

The Heart of Vikingur