Darkthrone’s A Blaze in the Northern Sky is black metal at its most primal

Darkthrone A Blaze in the Northern Sky

In his book Black Metal: History of the Cult, Dayal Patterson posits that Bathory established how black metal could induce hypnosis. He states, “Under the Sign of the Black Mark utilized repetition and minimalism as their primary weapons, building tension with a mesmerizing effect.” In other words, Bathory played fucking fast, loaded up the distortion, and rarely varied their riffs. It was a winning formula that would also personify black metal’s stubbornness. Though the genre has evolved and was evolving even during its halcyon ’90s period (if you doubt that, look at how many bands either went symphonic, electronic or BDSM less than 10 years after they formed), its attitude has always been headstrong. Inside its sphere, belief in oneself in relation to one’s black metal identity is steadfast. It’s there that select lonely and young outsiders took solace, forming a community—not above criticism, mind you—where weird kids in Nordic countries could bond over Kiss and Motörhead and drink their faces off. Did those beliefs go too far? Of course, but crucially, this scene was a piecemeal of international influences (from Brazil, Greece, England, and the United States), disenfranchisement and adolescence. 

Among the first great records from that scene was Darkthrone’s 1992 release, A Blaze in the Northern Sky. It is, in a word that’s not often tossed around with metal, cool. It’s defiant and defined, very much its own weird thing while ushering in what was becoming a larger thing. Additionally, it’s the shrouded story of three young adults (and a session bassist) haphazardly finding themselves. 

A year before Darkthrone released A Blaze in the Northern Sky, they were a death metal band and performed under their real names alongside bassist Dag Nilsen, but when that wasn’t cool, they pivoted to black metal, adorned face paint, and adopted their pseudonyms: Fenriz, Nocturno Culto and Zephyrous. At the time, they were 20, 19, and 18 years old, respectively. It was a stark personal reinvention, though one that could only happen in those early adult years when one’s sense of self is loosely defined at best. Yet Darkthrone lucked out. They didn’t jump onto a bandwagon; they shaped a large part of it. They identified a persona that others could latch themselves onto, one that outwardly projected the loneliness, oddness, and anger many young people feel as they enter the world and realize how little they share with those around them. Some people join a co-ed volleyball league, and others need to feel where the cold wind blows to feel like they belong. 

In Darkthrone’s eyes, the transition away from death metal was not immediate. Fenriz claimed that A Blaze in the Northern Sky was part death metal and part black metal, yet the record proves otherwise. That’s evident on “Paragon Belial,” which does not rely on the tremolo riffing black metal is famous for, fairly enough, but it’s wretched in a manner far removed from the thrash-indebted and earthy death metal of the time. Furthermore, Darkthone’s closest death metal contemporaries were Entombed, who had more groove in a single chorus than the entirety of A Blaze in the Northern Sky. Simply put, the album is too primal to be anything but black metal. It is the wolf howling at the moon—solitary and sonorous.  

To delve further into that, look at how A Blaze in the Northern Sky interacts with black metal’s attributes. Referring back to Bathory’s template and what Venom established years before with their poisoned Motörhead offshoot on Welcome to Hell, makes it easy to conflate the genre’s evil persona with speed and might. For instance, Ulver’s Nattens Madrigal- Aatte Hymne til Ulven i Manden is the superlative king of fast, heavy and lo-fi black metal, but it never sounds as possessed as A Blaze in the Northern Sky. There’s more brewing beneath the surface here, best indicated by the album’s bookending passages. What you hear first after pressing play are monks chanting “agathodaemon” as Nocuturno Culto recites an incantation. His delivery is strained like the words are crawling out of his trachea. The same passage is repeated as the record concludes, closing the proverbial Pandora’s box from which Darkthrone escaped. As a framing device, it sets the album apart from rock music designed to shock listeners and into an unholy realm.

Along similar lines, low fidelity production is revered as another aspect of “trve” black metal, though that conceit was discredited early on as one of the genre’s stalwart albums, Mayhem’s De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas, benefitted from a clear finish without losing much “evilness.” On the other hand, Varg Vikernes pushed lo-fi recording to its (at the time) extremities with Filosofem for reasons more akin to DIY hardcore punk bands than metal groups. He chose his equipment and instruments based on their ease of access and prided himself on recording as quickly as possible to rally against sanitized and rehearsed death metal that was trending at the time. Seems he’s always been reactionary. 

All of which is to say black metal’s lo-fi mentality was originally a weapon of defiance. Darkthrone pushed the envelope with how shitty you can sound on tape with their next two albums, Under a Funeral Moon and Transylvanian Hunger, but A Blaze in the Northern Sky is no studio masterwork either. Much like how roughly chopping your vegetables creates more ripples, thus increasing the amount of surface area that caramelized during cooking for a deeper flavor, Darkthrone’s coarse sound gave their music roughage and attitude beyond itself. It was a tool as much as anything else, one that reflected the youthful search for identity that powered A Blaze in the Northern Sky. It’s a well-known fact that the band’s label Peaceville didn’t want to release the album, both because of the shift away from death metal and because the mixing was too thin. Darkthrone threatened to leave them. Peaceville caved in. 

The album’s sound, tinny and serrated, personifies that stubbornness. It was necessary to wipe away the glamor of metal’s past decade in the limelight and provide a litmus test to those who wanted in. Though many influenced by Darkthrone would emulate the raw production for tradition’s sake just as much as they did for aesthetic purposes, on A Blaze in the Northern Sky, it was a boon to the music. Ultimately, the album was made to be played roughly. This is best experienced through Nocturno Culto’s vocals. They exist just on the periphery of human expression. Even when delivering what Darkthrone consider a traditional chorus on “In the Shadow of the Horns” (whose title we nicked for Treble’s metal column), Culto conveys inhuman emotions like a specter possessing a man’s vocal cords. He’s also just off the center in the mix, further designating him as an unwelcome visitor rather than a traditional frontman. A reliable narrator he is not.

All these aforementioned characteristics provide a runway for one of A Blaze in the Northern Sky’s sweetest fruits: the riffs. They are simple and satisfying, though they never present themselves at the onset of a track. Darkthrone places them in the middle of their songs, forcing you to weave through the chaos before you’re rewarded. The trio almost always takes a second to stop and hype them up before erupting, and Fenriz’s simplified drumming further builds this excitement, driving boots to the floor and necks to crane in anticipation. Piercing through the shroud that surrounds them, A Blaze in the Northern Sky’s riffs are one of the record’s few elements that are immediately digestible. “In the Shadow of the Horns” boasts two of the strongest, but the mightiest is the barn-burning, rip-snorting, hog-tying, Iommi-indebted beast nearly two minutes into the title track. For as much as A Blaze in the Northern Sky is draped in pseudo-lore, its appeal lay in these moments that sound like a bar fight between demons. 

Darkthrone further honed that feeling on A Blaze in the Northern Sky’s successors, disintegrating their production quality and regressing their songwriting to a primitive state. Those next two albums cemented black metal’s core by reducing A Blaze in the Northern Sky’s scope, pairing well with the Finnish black metal scene’s punk influence to birth what’s now considered raw black metal. Interestingly, in less than three years after A Blaze in the Northern Sky’s release, Mayhem, Emperor, Burzum, Dissection, and Summoning would all release world-class black metal albums that fattened up Darkthrone’s template. Darkthrone became the poster child for minimalist and scratchy black metal while others embellished the genre’s atmosphere, grandiosity, and musicianship. Yet, Darkthrone never felt outclassed, for even as black metal progressed, their early works formed the foundation of its second wave. A Blaze in the Northern Sky is no auditory fountain of youth, but it connects to the universal adolescent dilemma—constantly rebelling and seeking to define oneself, yet only using what one isn’t as a barometer. Darkthrone were rebelling against metal’s larger trends when they made A Blaze in the Northern Sky. What’s endured has done so on its own merits, away from the trends—death metal, music trends, and any outsiders of their scene—Darkthrone intended to spite.


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