Joel Varg Johansson (born August 29, 1993), known online as Vargskelethor Joel, or just Vargskelethor, is a Swedish live streamer and musician. He co-founded thrash metal band Scythelord In 2011, and released their debut album, Toxic Minds in 2016. He started making comedic heavy metal tracks under his pseudonym in 2014. Johansson is best known for being a member of the former online content creator collective Vinesauce.
In 2011, he co-founded with Floridian collaborator Frank Hernandez<nowiki/>' the thrash metal band Scythelord. In 2016, Johansson and Hernandez, released their debut album, Toxic Minds. Johansson would be the guitarist and vocalist. In October 2018, Toilet Ov Hell listed Scythelord's song "Speed Metal War" for their "Riff Of The Week". In 2019 Scythelord released the EP, Asclepius. Invisible Oranges said that Asclepius had a "dynamic range and the breadth of its emotional arc feels much more substantial." In 2021, Their second album, Earth Boiling Dystopia, would be released. In 2025, Scythelord released a cover version of the song "The Crippler" by the German thrash metal band Sodom. This resulted in Johansson and Hernandez meeting Sodom in an in-person meetup. In a YouTube video by Johansson in December 2024, he would document his and Hernandez's trip to the Hell's Heroes VI festival in Houston. Scythelord are planing to release an upcoming EP, Masters of the Scythe.
In October 2014, Johansson made his debut with the song "Pineapples do not belong on a pizza". Johansson, under his pseudonym, Vargskelethor, released a trilogy of heavy metal albums titled Skeleton Metal between 2014 and 2019. Skeleton Metal was primarily composed of short, skeleton-themed metal, comedy tracks. On April 4, 2023, Vargskelethor released a sequel to the trilogy, Skeleton Metal X.
The Progressive Subway would call the recording and production quality "fairly rough, although Joel's musical talent improved and his song writing grew noticeably more ambitious by the end of the trilogy." Garret Roberts of RMU Sentry Media called the second album in the trilogy "Joel us[ing] his metal talents to perform goofy songs about skeletons while offering genuinely good metal." Marc Desgagné of Metal Universe criticized the production of Skeleton Metal X for being "very disjointed", with some of the songs having a "big difference" in quality in between tracks. Overall, Desgagné rated the album a 7.5/10.'
Johansson is best known for being a member of the former online content creator collective Vinesauce. Johansson impact on the channel would be popularizing Internet memes, such as The Daily Dot citing Joel's RollerCoaster Tycoon videos as bringing various memes to a wider audience.
In 2021, a Reddit user named "Sparta123" wrote a thread on r/tipofmyjoystick describing a farming game akin to Harvest Moon that they tried to recall. This would start a 5 year mystery of rumors that spread to various social media communities, attempting to investigate the existence of the farming game. It was later identified by Sparta123, that it originated from 2015 clip from one of Joel's streams playing the game Global Defense Force. In 2021, Johansson apologized in a Twitch stream for the time that users had wasted in searching for a non-existent game.
The following songs are available on Joel's Bandcamp page: