Darkthrone, the long-running Norwegian formerly-black metal band, will be releasing its 16th full-length album, “The Underground Resistance”, next month via Peaceville Records. It is the fifth album that the band has released since reuniting with Peaceville, with whom the band worked for their first four albums.
Today, the label posted a new song from the upcoming album on its SoundCloud page. The song, called “Leave No Cross Unturned”, makes good on earlier statements made by the band expressing a bit of a change in sound for the upcoming release.
Previously a pioneering band in the widely influential Norwegian black metal scene in the early 90s, Darkthrone has spent much of the past decade releasing itself from the shackles of the band’s earlier adherence to genre orthodoxy by recording seemingly whatever material strikes their particular moods.
This voyage has taken the band’s sound into a variety of other metal sub-genres, and if “Leave No Cross Unturned” is any indication, “The Underground Resistance” will see the band explore speed/thrash metal and epic traditional heavy metal with greater earnest than at any other point in their history, replete with an improved clean vocal performance by Fenriz.
At the same time, the second half of the song also pays homage to the band’s past, echoing its earlier Celtic Frost, Bathory, and Autopsy inspired “A Blaze in the Northern Sky” release from early 1992.
The track even concludes with the familiar cry of “Nocturno Culto!”—who is the band’s guitarist, bassist, and primary vocalist—which echoes the song “In the Shadow of the Horns”, one of the iconic songs of the Norwegian black metal movement.
Perhaps it is a nod to the expression “the more things change, the more they stay the same”.
Darkthrone as a band has gone through a number of musical evolutions.
From the band’s primitive demo days in the late 80s that were all over the place to their early death metal period to the widely influential black metal records and finally to the 2000s, they have seemingly gone back to their roots in the mid-80s to find inspiration from their formative years as young metal fans.
Like this article? Then please subscribe to this author’s articles about heavy metal and hard rock by clicking the subscribe button next to the author’s name or here to receive an e-mail notification whenever a new article is posted.
Comments