Darkthrone - Eternal Hails (2021)^{Release ID: 28908}

What I find when listening to a new Darkthrone album is that on the first couple of spins I'm listening for the album I expected them to make. Only on subsequent plays do I finally hear the album that they intended me to hear (not me specifically, but you know what I mean). Consequently, despite being a huge Darkthrone fan, I was initially a little underwhelmed by the irrepressible duo's nineteenth studio album, Eternal Hails. However, subsequent listens have brought me round to their way of thinking. The album takes heavy metal and doom riffs and runs them through a black metal filter which strips them back to their very core and renders them in glorious lo-fi mode which, when coupled with Nocturno Culto's croaking vocal delivery, propels the listener back to the days of black metal's first wave, when BM was a genre still finding it's metal feet. There is a particular affinity here with 1980s Celtic Frost and very early Bathory which is not mere plagiarism, but an homage that is paid with affection and given the Darkthrone treatment it seems to invest the eighties sound with a more foetid atmosphere than any amount of corpsepaint could ever achieve. There seems to be a surfeit of naysayers listening to this album, but I personally think there are some cool riffs, I love Nocturno Culto's vocals and Fenriz still knocks the living shit out of his drumkit. Tracks like His Masters Voice and Voyage to a Northpole Adrift may take a bit more patience than usual to get into, but they are worth it.

Look this isn't classic-era Darkthrone - those days were great while they lasted and where would we be without A Blaze in the Northern Sky, Under a Funeral Moon, Transilvanian Hunger and Panzerfaust? But those were albums penned by young bloods riding the crest of an exciting and irrepressible new wave of metal. Times and people change and that was then, this is now and Nocturno Culto and Fenriz get their kicks by re-interpreting, in their own inimitable style, metal from days of yore that inspired them originally. Personally, I love the fact that Darkthrone exist and are able to tap into a vein of metal that reaches back across the decades. Maybe latter day Darkthrone doesn't do it for everyone, especially the younger metalheads, but it feels good to know they are still out there doing their thing and kinda growing old with their fanbase. A Blaze... was almost thirty years ago now, get over it.