Ever since they first slicked on the corpse paint in 1986, the seminal Norwegian black metal band Darkthrone have raged an unrelenting war on the Puritanical mores of the West: devout Christianity, blind patriotism to both God and Country, the status quo’s broader distrust of anything rock. Of course, as the original espousers of “True Norwegian Black Metal” and former associates of Burzum’s gun-toting, white nationalist frontman Varg Vikernes, they’ve had to swat off many an accusation of racism.
Considering Darkthrone’s anti-establishment mindset in tandem with their controversial past, it’s easy to label them outcasts–and yet, in 2016, Gylve “Fenriz” Nagell and Nocturno Culto are hardly pariahs. I’m not just speaking in terms of the metal community, either: just this year, Nagell’s neighbors in the Oslo suburb of Kolbotn elected him—the debauched king of KVLT!–to town council. (The musician, to his credit, did his best to dissuade voters; his “campaign” comprised but a single photo of the bearded axeman cradling his adorable cat, with the caption “Please don’t vote for me.”). “I’m not too pleased about it. It’s boring,” he later grumbled to CLRVYNT, later admitting, a bit begrudgingly: “I’m a pillar of my community.”
Darkthrone’s seventeenth studio album, Arctic Thunder, bristles with a similar recognition of power, albeit over a far more hostile constituency than the prankish Norwegian suburbanites who stuck Fenriz in office. Like most of Nagell and Culto’s output since downsizing to a duo two decades ago, it’s an album tailor-made for a diverse metal electorate. Rather than Xerox their classic A Blaze in the Northern Sky, the pair express their longstanding aggression through a seamless, genre-hopping lexicon of death growls, doom dirges, and thrash runs as immediate as they are all-encompassing.
Don’t mistake their expanded palette for a lack of focus: as always, Darkthrone keep these eight songs’ latent chaos on a tight choke-chain, timing the hellish tremolo riffs as carefully and slowly as an October surprise; before arriving at the weepy pinnacle of lead single “Tundra Leech,” we must first power through the Pentagram-y crunch of both verse and chorus, its already-dramatic lurch made all the more queasy by otherworldly groans, trembling and liminal like a vengeful spirit howling from the other side of the void. That haunting catharsis seems downright generous, however, compared to cuts like “Throw Me Through the Marshes” and “Inbred Vermin,” which offer even less tangibility and resolution: the guitars’ firm-footed cadence does little to allay the mounting dread inherent in their creeping backbeats, Trojan horses to presage the duo’s imminent (but nonetheless unpredictable) sludgy torrents.
However foreboding their latest effort may be, Nagell and Culto aren’t out to scare us shitless—as with its predecessor, 2013’s excellent The Underground Resistance, Arctic Thunder’s predominant mood is one of playful, if unflinchingly perverse, glee: a thirty-nine minute, low-stakes stampede down memory lane, recorded at the Bomb Shelter rehearsal unit they utilized at the end of the ’80s, back when their nightmarish journey started. The album’s proliferation of feel-bad jams ensures an entertaining listen that’s bound to shut up the purists who consider the band’s downsizing a detriment—in fact, even as a duo, Darkthrone have never sounded more like themselves. Considering how important transparency is to politics, as well as music, it should come as no surprise that Nagell attained public office. Of course, being photographed with a cute cat didn’t hurt, either.
