The Internet is chock-full of novelty tests—and a few purportedly serious ones—but none is so challenging as IKEA or Death, which will have you second-, third-, and fourth-guessing every answer you come up with.
Marketing specialists Gatesman+Dave came up with the instantly classic concept: Can you tell the difference between the goofy names that IKEA gives its affordable furniture sets and the names of bands that play some variety of heavy metal? (The authors preemptively apologize for applying the “death” subgenre label across the board, knowing full well that metalheads get very persnickety about these distinctions.)
That metal bands have a penchant for umlauts and other Scandinavian-sounding syllables—in fairness, a lot of them hail from that region—only makes it more difficult to distinguish their monikers from IKEA’s Swedish products. Norden, for example, is “a beautiful wooden table with 6 drawers of storage,” while Einherjer is “a Viking metal band named for the warriors who sit at Odin’s table in Valhalla.” I’ll let you take a wild guess as to what “Grundtal” could possibly be.
Aside from reminding us that there a finite amount of guttural phonemes across all human languages, “IKEA or Death Metal” will also remind you that home improvement’s not a bad hobby to have—check it out, an oven with a five-year warranty! And when you correctly identify a metal band, you get to hear an aggressive burst of music that’ll remind you of that basement you hung out in all through high school years, probably while sitting on … an IKEA couch. Whoa.
And here’s what you get if you do well:
Photo by Ham Hock/Flickr