DARKTHRONE Arctic Thunder (2016) CD

By 2016, Darkthrone had long since stopped caring what anyone thought, which is exactly why Arctic Thunder lands as hard as it does.

Fenriz and Nocturno Culto spent the decade prior moving through first-wave worship and crust punk territory, and Arctic Thunder pulls those threads back toward something rawer and more deliberate. It is not a return to the Transilvanian Hunger blueprint, it is something stranger, a band in their fourth decade still genuinely writing music for themselves. The production is deliberately blunt, the riffs are slow and heavy in places where early black metal was fast and freezing, and the whole thing sounds like it was made without a single committee meeting. For a genre that calcified around its own mythology a long time ago, that is not nothing. One of the better late-period records in Norwegian black metal, and that is not a short list to beat.

CD. Released 2016. Black metal, Norway.

Fans of: Emperor, Mayhem, Immortal, Dark Funeral, Satyricon