8 May 2024
As has been their tradition in recent years, Darkthrone announced the album after it was completely ready, shortly before its release. They have a distant understanding of the PR work we see in many other bands. In other words, they don’t have a real PR understanding but they rather present their music focusing on the fact how much they rely on it.
Darkthrone is a band who have already determined their own truths and share its music with an anti-stereotype approach. These guys breathe and live the music. To approach their attitude in terms of personae, Fenriz is like today’s Lemmy while Nocturno Culto is Jeff Hanneman. While Fenriz has a slightly more extroverted character, like he is the Spokesman of the band, Nocturno Culto, although not shying away from appearing on stages, portrays a more introverted and at the same time self-sufficient, productive and competent character.
Coming back to the album, in general terms, the music is pretty much what Darkthrone put forth in recent years. Not only are the guys one of the bands that wrote the history of Norwegian black metal, but at the same time, since “The Cult is Alive”, their each album is like a separate volume creating an encyclopedia-like corpus for metal listeners. And eventually, they will have left a marvellous artistic heritage to their home country Norway.
Their music includes fragments from the proto metal era to NWOBHM, speed/thrash/power metal and crust. It is very likely to get Tomas Gabriel Fisher feeling from the vocals of Nocturno Culto. The album carries traces of the old Darkthrone in many places. For example, the introduction of The Heavy Hand directly brings to mind Hordes of Nebulah. The melody of the closing song, The Lone Pines of the Lost Planet resembles NWOBHM bands. Fenriz is a man who is very knowledgeable about music and especially drum writing. I think the most important thing about recording of the drums is that the bass drum is toned very close to the bass guitar. Thus, the bass drums sound deep and make a nice contribution to the music as if there is a second bass guitar. Fenriz wrote drum lines that are far from pretentiousness such as being too fast, extra-varied or original. He is like a natural born metronome and does reveal the rhythmic route of the music with the meticulousness of a watchmaker.
The wonderful cover by Zbigniew Bielak suits the album very well. It’s a great album that metal listeners will have great fun. I think Darkthrone, with their self-developed intractability to be unique, got people used to listening to this beautiful music and witness the roots of heavy metal. Since years, have they shut the mouths of many people who initially criticized them like “this can’t be Darkthrone” and made them evolve by wrapping them up with their sonic universe. I being one, liked the album very much. It is a great opportunity to witness various moments of the heavy metal journey from the 60s to the present day. Especially when created by one of the very masters of it.
9,5/10
