DARKTHRONE - Pre-Historic Metal

For Fenriz and Nocturno Culto, this is a mission. Rather than looking forward, the idea is to go back in time, imagining what heavy music might sound like if it were played by two cavemen. It's no coincidence that the video for the title track, released a while back, threw dinosaurs of every stripe in our faces, alongside a track leaning toward what we might call primordial speed metal: a chaotic, oddball piece, perhaps improvised by a project that can nonetheless afford to coast on its laurels after having written some of the most important pages in the history of black metal.

Obviously one question comes to mind: if the Darkthrone logo were to magically disappear from the album cover, replaced by that of some unknown band, what kind of reception would "Pre-Historic Metal" actually get? Because the freefall, save for a few notable exceptions, began not long after "Panzerfaust" (it's 1995 when the two Norwegians made their last true masterpiece).

With this comeback, expectations certainly weren't high, but one could still have hoped to land somewhere near the rough-edged "The Underground Resistance" (2013), their best album of the last twenty years. Instead, there's not much worth saving here, aside from the great riff that opens "They Found One Of My Graves", the rocky gallop of "Deeply Rooted", or the speed metal temptations of "The Dry Wells Of Hell" (where Fenriz's vocal cords once again launch into the high-pitched shrieks of old).

Among the various influences present on "Pre-Historic Metal", there's as always a not-inconsiderable doom component, to which must be added another drawing from blackened crust, not to mention Darkthrone's main point of reference, namely Hellhammer/Celtic Frost. However, with more than forty years now having passed since the golden age of heavy metal in its most traditional form, the nostalgia operation carried out by the two Norwegians sounds more like an exercise in (non-)style delivered on the usual autopilot: the album is certainly better than the rather unsatisfying "It Beckons Us All…" (2024), but it's still at least a couple of notches below the rock-solid "Old Star" (2019), remaining confined to their most recent phase. A rather quirky phase that looks straight at a Paleolithic-inspired imagery, one that even brings a bit of a smile to our faces.

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17/05/2026