Darkthrone : Pre-Historic Metal
Darkthrone seem to have shifted their overall project toward thesis metal. While before, their earlier albums could be slotted relatively neatly into slots like death metal, raw black metal, crust punk, even doom, thrash and traditional heavy metal later on, their continued hybridization of elements via de-evolution seems to have delivered them to a Platonic realm of heavy metal qua itself. How else do you explain Pre-Historic Metal, which fuses riffs that sound like they belong on Kill ‘Em All with riffs that seem straight off of Scream Bloody Gore to atmospheres and ideas reminiscent of Don’t Break The Oath, and still not have described the fullness of the sound of the album?
The most shocking moment however still is the final minute of album opener “They Found One of My Graves” which bursts suddenly into the cosmicism of prog with a spacious and dreamlike synth solo. That it emerges from a mid-tempo thrasher, combined with that alluring album title, makes it clear that while their sound has deliberately in the same blissful sense of simple savagery for the last twenty years, the aim of this sonic reduction has been in pursuit of the ineffable undifferentiated spirit of heavy metal. No longer does one or another subgenre feel adequate to describe the proper scope of their sound.
And yet they achieve this vast universal sound, one capable of mapping the interior of heavy metal seemingly in its totality, without bridging into the possible pretension or theatricality of codifying the cliches. Their doomy moments here still feel menacing, the black and death metal primordial and threatening, the thrash and traditional heavy metal full of black leather and heroism. These are not stereotypes of genre but fulfillments of them, the kind that require the lifetime of study and true devotion we know the band has, especially given Fenriz’s time as a DJ spinning deep enough metal cuts it would make a historian blush out of inadequacy.
Pre-Historic Metal joins a fascinating pantheon of records from Darkthrone: Panzerfaust, Circle the Wagons and The Underground Resistance. The entirety of their career up until Panzerfaust can be defined by that album, with every after until the crust punk turn coming directly out of it. The style of raw black metal they pioneered with their unholy trinity has never quite returned to the band; instead, it is this primitivist first-wave black metal approximation, baring more in common with Venom than with your current cassette-driven microlabel projects, that has defined their approach to the genre. The turn toward crust punk and hardcore, which saw its apex reached on Circle the Wagons, seemed to be a deliberate exploration of a necessary wing of heavy metal development that the metal underground from then and up until the present seem to want to deny and distance themselves from. Darkthrone, however, have a clear fierce hunger to understand. The Underground Resistance, the album that followed, was a one-and-done study in early heavy metal, mastering in a single stroke the primal font of heavy metal sans adjectives. From Arctic Thunder onward, it has been the road toward this moment.
And yet for as compelling as Pre-Historic Metal is, already my second favorite of the group after The Underground Resistance, with each second of its runtime filled to overflowing with abundant love of the form, it is hard to confidently say their developmental arc toward that pre-differenciated core is complete. After all, while Old Star indicated the overall direction of this wing of the band’s life, taking the proto-thrash of Arctic Thunder and adding doom to the process. Hell, one album was even called Eternal Hails…... Each album that followed seemed at once like the current apex and validation of this era. Pre-Historic Metal is their strongest document thus far to derive a sound that could before your eyes differentiate into traditional metal, black metal, death metal, thrash metal, doom metal, a universe of sound, without collapsing the wave form and escaping its Deleuzean immanence. But given their study of this world of music, which now approaches that of an ancient crooked wizard bent over dusty singularly rare and powerful tomes forgotten by man, it is hard to tell if the arrow might arc ever onward still.
Label: Peaceville
Year: 2026
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