Fenriz posted the opening track from Darkthrone’s upcoming album Arctic Thunder.
Allright folks, this here is the opening track on the album. The first riff came to me when I was out camping with the oldtimer that took the photo of me here. – f e n r i z:
Tags: Arctic Thunder, Black Metal, darkthrone, Heavy Metal, new track, norway
This is terrible.
Tell me when they stop trying to be simple Tom G. Warrior copy cats.
I like Darkthrone, but this isn’t that good.
‘salright. Could’ve been much worse.
Nice pics fenriz.
This is boring as Fukc. Their last album was a bit of diamond in the rough of their otherwise monotonous career, post 1996. Pre ’96 they were Gods.
If you want to hear Fenriz doing this story thing over music that isn’t ass there’s commentary uploads of Blaze, Funeral Moon and Panzerfaust on Youtube. It’s actually a great idea, I wish more musicians did it.
Simple, doomy track, very much Black Sabbath influenced from the start. »Diocletian done right« keeps suggesting itself. But there’s no way to do that right. The vocals are some kind of presumably intentionally awkward proto-“death metal”, “The teacher and the postman coming to get you one more time”,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LL5g-BIvPHo
[Alvin Lee, “Going Home” with the Elvis band in 2004]
This is anything but bad which makes it much worse.
So. Everyone’s going to say “this sucks” and “that’s no Under A Funeral Moon” and “they haven’t written anything good since Panzerfaust” but what the hell are you all talking about? All you fools are looking for is a youthful voice to follow. Something with an adolescent glaze to it that makes the voice feel fresh or unique or original and untouched by the pollution of greed and liberalism. Wake the hell up. The voices you were listening to are old now! The nihilistic leaders we were all inspired by are exactly the same as they were in the 80s and 90s. When was the last time you heard an inspiring voice from a millenial? Never. How many of you have listened to a crotchety old man and thought to yourselves “that guy has his shit together. I wish i were so wise.” Open you eyes and ears. Is it so bad that these old bands we’ve loved are still making the same style of music we revered back then? There’s only so much that can be done. Understand the meaning behind it. Get your heads out of your stale, dry asses and enjoy. To me, these bands that are making an attempt at capturing the atmosphere of the past make it clear that the present is failing. It doesn’t make you look cool to say the new stuff sucks.
Do we really want revolutionaries like Darkthrone to stop making music just because we say so? How hypocritcal is that? Natural selection and the industrial revolution mandates that there will be less and less of these kinds of people to learn from. And yes, it’s happening right now as you drunkenly drool over your Celtic Frost record and imagine what they could have done. Meanwhile, there are classic-minded bands that are still making music fueled by the same mentality that implored them to write in the first place. It is still inspired music. And it’s more than music now. It’s means more than it meant in the 80s and 90s.
I, for one, am definitely not looking for a youthful voice to follow. I’m also not expecting Darkthrone to put out Transylvanian Hunger Pt 2: Still Hungry, But It’s After Midnight So I Guess I’ll Buy Some Cheap Ass Mexican Food and Get Diarrhea. I do, however, hold these guys to a higher standard than your average jackoffs given their past output.
My thought with youthful voice comment was that to the untrained, those voices and opinions sound unique and inspired but in reality they have no substance, especially these days. The old(er) voices may sometimes sound cliched or played out when in reality they are informed and molded by experience.
Most people, both young and old, make uninteresting music.
Current Darkthrone included.
That’s the exact problem with this: It’s a well-executed (but badly mixed, drums are way too hidden) mannerism by people styling themselves as »oldtimers« and playing for an audience they regard as »oldtimers«. That’s pretty pathetic for two guys who are just about middle-aged others would refer to as »fourtysomething« (recently seen on BBC news in commentary about the UK government change) and “We are so fourtysomething! Fuck yeah!” is simply not interesting.
I’d have no problem linking here to older, same age and newer bands playing stuff I like much better, single example
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZXjp30gn7k
The present has been happily failing since at least the turn of the 20th century (I have written first-hand sources for this) and presumbably, since ever (around that time, some guy went in search for the good old times but found only people complaining about their present for as far as he went back).
I disagree with the poor mixing. I think it sounds as it should. To me, the sound of the music in your link is way too clean and over produced, like american metalcore. It’s lacking character.
I wasn’t writing about ‘the production’: One of the properties of the Darkthrone track is that the drums are barely audible even when using headphones (with clear channel seperation). That’s different from older “That’s just like black metal sounds” (I sort of expected your reply) Darkthrone tracks where the drumming is as prominent as the other instruments. Changing this is IMHO not an improvement.
Addition: You have to make some allowances for poor playback devices here. The device I usually use for CD playback is a cheap, table-top CD player,
https://encrypted-tbn2.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQuKA_r_HzsWZ8FYqs8jzKWaQCcFs1NWsE5AIf2hVCvAlABj_Nmag
and quality-wise, that’s much worse than a cheap pair of headphones connected to a computer (I’d love to have at least a 5 band equalizer and some real boxes but that’s nowadays way beyond what I can spend on this in good conscience). The “Live at Leipzig” I recently lauded here sounds very nice on that and that’s a better bootleg.
This has nothing to do with recording but too much compression used in mastering.
Clearly we are not speaking the same language here. It must be boring to have conversations when you believe you have all the answers.
Did it occur to you that you’re exactly the only guy who’s wailing about how ‘old’ Darkthrone is meanwhile? This means you’re trash-talking them by attributing the deficiencies of this “to their genes” (!!1) while asserting that any attempt to do better is hopeless because “the younger genes” are just “kaputt by design”. I’m indeed not talking in this language.
It’d be preferable to have a conversation in person with you. I could probably learn a lot.
DON’T DO IT IT’S A TRAP!!!!
Ditto. Stop trying to act cool. 93 came and went. Shut the fuck up and stop trying to raise the bar by repping a bunch of shit. Morons
Wait, so you are accusing the writers of this website of yearning for a 1993 sound, while you defend Darkthrone’s obsession over Tom G. Warrior’s 1985 style that basically makes them constantly rebound to his style?
That doesn’t make too much sense if you ask me…
Shut the fuck up. Start ur own band. Asspipes
lol, the whole song is like two riffs, and they’re both boring
Darkthrone was doing 3 riff songs back in the day, too, on Transilvanyan Hunger.
For some reason it wasn’t shit. I don’t know why, I can’t explain it.
Back then they had something to prove. Now they’ve proven what they set out to and are just making music for shits and giggles, evidently.
Another long shot: »Norwegian black metal« collapsed/ mushroomed into ‘melodic’, ‘consumer friendly’ deformity post-1994 because the essential people were either dead or imprisoned by then. Early ‘black’ Darkthrone is essentially Burzum with Oystein-style guitar solos[*] and without the ‘toddler on a skewer’ vocal mannerisms.
Aside: Look at this
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/4/49/Live_in_Leipzig_cover.jpg/220px-Live_in_Leipzig_cover.jpg
compared to
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/6/6e/Darkthrone_-_Transilvanian_Hunger.jpg/220px-Darkthrone_-_Transilvanian_Hunger.jpg
‘Transilvania’ was also an Ohlin-favorite.
[*] A Blaze In The Northern Sky” is eternally dedicated to the King of Black/Death Metal underground; namely Euronymous!
http://www.darklyrics.com/lyrics/darkthrone/ablazeinthenorthernsky.html
Absolute blast from the past. Thank you master fenriz and Ted for keeping the old spirit alive. Hail Darkthrone.
This meta-metal approach makes me sick.
Fucking reenactors/cosplayers.
The guy has nothing to say with his songs so he explains his riffs and – my motherfucking Allah! – the production.
He did that with the good albums, too.
It’s just a thing that he does.
He didn’t really “explain the production”, more the absence of it, eg base tracks (guitar and drums) recorded as played in a shared rehearsal room. That’s something more bands should do instead of genuflecting to the tin god of … what precisely? What’s “a wrong note”?
Idiots Everywhere says… well folks, i love the writers here so much. And hey that’s fine. I’m speaking of you ya hack. You have no taste and your opinion s are just wrong. Suck the cock you rode in on.
Moron
I hate you!
Well its not some teenagers or someone who hasn’t made a record in 3 decades so its just horrible. I love some folks on here act like they even have a clue as to what compression is. And “oh dude, like this record, like has the Absolute worst production.. Hahaha. fuck knob.
It’s surprising to me that this song could evoke such strong feelings, even in a complete retard like yourself…
I didn’t write that. I very specifically wrote that I could barely hear anything of the drums when listening to this. I don’t know if this is intentional or accidental but I don’t think it’s a good idea: Master Fenriz tends to play interesting stuff and I missed that here.