“How much primitive can you get!?” Darkthrone’s Fenriz asks the sycophantic Rockhard magazine interviewer in the famous video since carved into the lore of Youtube comedy/metal legend (see below). The question was made in reference to punk band Adrenalin O.D. and was of course rhetoric. But the answer is worth considering and probably falls somewhere around early Sodom, Hellhammer and Venom.

Fenriz and partner Nocturno Culto have taken their high regard for these bands to new lows over the last five years or so, leaving the raw black metal style they helped spearhead in the early Nineties far behind. Can you blame him? Black metal has become “like flies to a pile of shit,” to borrow a lyric from “Splitkein Fever,” off of Darkthrone’s 2007 release F.O.A.D.

But these (re)evolutions are to be expected. What many saw as the late-Eighties oversaturation of death metal was partial cause for Mayhem’s Euronymous to steal Bathory’s sound, take it to Norway, and found his depraved black metal cult. And Darkthrone, after recording one of the best death metal albums in history, 1990’s Soulside Journey, turned their back on anything core/fun/mosh related and Fenriz and Nocturno Culto became the super grim twins.

So here, some seventeen years later, we are presented with Darkthrone’s fourteenth full-length: Dark Thrones and Black Flags (Peaceville) and it is indeed primitive, both in production and execution. If the best black metal is more or less atavistic versions of punk and atmospheric, under-produced thrash then Darkthrone are still delivering…even as they increasingly eliminate the atmospherics.

While most of their contemporaries have gone artsy with cerebral darkness or overproduced glam, and the surrounding scene has become a Halloween fashion show, with Dark Thrones and Black Flags Nocturno Culto and Fenriz go for a hike into the winter woods, plug a chainsaw into an amplifier, and start banging on beer cans with broken tree branches.

The opening riff of “The Winds They Called the Dungeon Shaker” is pulled from familiar dissonant black metal lexicon. But once the Philthy Animal Taylor D-beat kicks in it’s clear we are back in F.O.A.D. territory. In fact, DTBF is so similar to Darkthrone’s previous record it could easily be its second half. (Which is the lesser half? A question that could be argued by nerds into eternity.)

Yes, many of these sounds have been made before by men with strings and sticks and beer, but there’s no denying it’s still a hell of a ride. A drive through the past in the Darkthrone family truckster: the radio plays early thrash (listen to the “Oath Minus” riff), crust punk and of course necro black. The death metal exit is once again skipped completely and we are taken straight to Wally World. I see Fenriz and Culto holding John Candy hostage on a roller coaster that barrels through Norwegian forests where winter blacksmiths work, up to Germany (“Hanging out in Haiger”), and finally into altogether unknown realms (“Witch Ghetto”).

But all kidding and leaving Fenriz’s jester reputation aside, any trace of irony is absent from this recording: this is simply what these guys do. DTBF is the cumulative effect of years within the scene, obsessive record collecting, and musical influences that are hammered and reworked into a wrought-iron necro crust.

Having been in on black metal’s ground floor, Darkthrone are no longer slaves to the genre’s borders. They can come and go freely. They know the gatekeeper well. —Adam Ganderson