Album Anniversaries: 30 Years of Darkthrone’s Diabolical ‘A Blaze in the Northern Sky’
It’s the album which set an entire genre in motion, and though the duo have grown and evolved since, the band never forgot its blackened roots.
Written by Felix Kalvesmaki
Photo courtesy of Spirit of Metal
Norwegian black metal is oft-remembered for its bloody origins. As one of extreme metal’s most diabolical subgenres, it’s worth remembering that it truly began with a bunch of misanthropic Nordic teenagers in the ’90s, who got a bit too into the act and shed some real blood. In line with the pain of the modern world, Black metal heavyweight Burzum’s founder is a tabletop game designer/Neo Nazi, and most of the people who ran in black metal circles ended up as one or the other, too.
Fenriz of Darkthrone fame diverted paths. For one thing, he’s not a convicted murderer. For another, he’s a mail carrier, and a public servant to boot. He, alongside the duo’s other remaining member Nocturno Culto, continue to make music as infernal as they did in their heyday. Since their void-black origins, they’ve tried punk and doom metal, but always came back to the Satanic riffs of black metal, like they did on their most recent release, Eternal Hails.
We’re three decades away from Darkthrone’s second record, the group's first foray into black metal. After spending an album toying with death metal, one of Darkthrone's defining efforts, dubbed A Blaze in the Northern Sky, harbors all the raucous racket a fan of the genre can ask for, all in its rawest iteration. Not only is the playing and vocalization at its most endearingly amateur (not to say bad, for the record), but it somehow seems even more lo-fi and grungy than its follow-ups. Interesting to note, considering the genre prides itself on that noisy, staticky recording process. To the uninitiated, Darkthrone’s music could sound like rotten screaming. To those able to take the infernal heat, it’s a devious tour of what’s possible beyond the realm of obsessively hi-fi, pristine production. And because of the groundwork this record helped to lay, Fenriz and Culto have an entire genre behind them.
Darkthrone establishes some conventions of its black metal in this album: a flair for gothic dramatics and aesthetics, a pining for something devilish and forsaken, and a penchant for sinful guitar riffs. Not to mention, from a production standpoint, the album sounds like hell. Which is exactly the point — Darkthrone, and thus black metal as a whole, seems to aim for something so crusted in char, something so brutally broiled by Lucifer’s flames, that it’s entirely indecipherable. And by God, by Satan, do they succeed. It’s accentuated by Culto’s screaming performance, a bit more guttural and less-practiced than on the records that’ll follow. On “Kathaarian Life Code,” his voice nearly cracks.
Image courtesy of Peaceville Records
Fenriz’s writing is one of the things that truly does improve from Darkthrone's previous efforts. Those familiar with the band may be aware of the text removed from the back of one of its albums — the back of 1994’s Transilvanian Hunger contained the text "Norsk Arisk Black Metal" ("Norwegian Aryan black metal"). So there was obviously some room for growth, and luckily, that growth has come to pass: Fenriz assertively proclaimed Darkthrone wasn’t a Nazi band during the release of 1995’s Panzerfaust, and has been quoted since as thinking of his former actions as “disgusting,” according to the book “Black Metal: Evolution of the Cult.” As much as Fenriz’s controversial lyrics deserve scrutiny and no one would be wrong for remaining skeptical, there is a noted difference in the way members of Darkthrone have approached their past and addressed it as misguided, and the way their contemporaries continue to live as Nazis. A Blaze in the Northern Sky also offers good ol’ Pagan fun in its lyrics, trending the work and its problematics more toward “angsty kid into spirituality” and less toward “angsty kid that grows up to be Varg Vikernes.” And hey, there’s an entire circle of communist black metal meant to combat this very problem in the genre, some of whom take influence from Darkthrone.
There is, admittedly, not a ton of stylistic changes made for the records that’ll follow this one. A Blaze in the Northern Sky, alongside its follow-ups Under a Funeral Moon and Transilvanian Hunger, were released in consecutive years, seemingly more of companion projects for one another than separate works in retrospect. Fans of the band call these three “the unholy trinity,” and its members deliver on the title. The consistency is genuinely impressive. The musicianship on these records, although clearly performed by adolescents, is good. The drumming is insanely quick, the riffs are both catchy and delectably evil, and the vocals push further than a lot of their contemporaries at the time. Darkthrone tries incredibly hard to sound this shitty, and it shows.
The band has come a long way. Darkthrone’s records to this day maintain a lo-fi grain, but nothing comes close to the harsh concoction of sin A Blaze in the Northern Sky and its two follow-ups serve on a platter. Fenriz and Culto have matured, but not so much as to forget what made their debut into black metal so frigid, satisfying, and enjoyable. From the corpse paint the duo donned on their album covers to the affect donned for vocals, it’s black metal history and culture pressed onto 12 inches of vinyl. Darkthrone's sophomore effort is a fantastic distillation of that, and set the band up for a legendary career in the world of extreme metal.