It’s 6:00am. I’m on my second cup of Vietnamese coffee, strong and black. I returned from vacation about 12 hours earlier. Charleston, South Carolina was and is an absolutely gorgeous town, filled with rich history. But I needed to go deeper; I needed more than the centuries that beautiful city could offer…

I needed Pre-History.

Under my feet I could feel the firmament tremble, the tectonic plates shifting not from natural forces, but from the reawakening of that Leviathan of the Kvlt, those Purveyors of the Primitive…yes, Fenriz and Ted, aka the mighty Darkthrone, have returned to put my body back into its St. Vitus Dance of delight with the 100% subtlety removed Pre-Historic Metal. Let’s get into it.

My history and love for the duo have been well-documented on this site; I still have a soft rule that any year Darkthrone release a record it’s my favorite record of the year, even if it’s not listed as such on lists like these (although sometimes it is). They’re the band who gave me a voice to make my own music; the first thing I ever released as Necrolytic Goat Converter was me basically trying to ape a Darkthrone song to see how it felt.

It’s been a long, strange trip for the mighty pair, their sojourns taking them from the halls of technical death to forging the fires of second-wave black metal, embracing thrash and punk in the late ’00s with a slight detour into epic power (HAILS TO THE UNDERGROUND RESISTANCE) before arriving at their current iteration of cold, doom-laden heavy metal while remaining anchored to their, well…history. And upon initial listens of the title track, released as a single, it would appear Fenriz and Ted haven’t tired of their current archeological excavation. But digging deeper (this metaphor is going to tire real quick, apologies) as per usual with the duo reveals subtle layers and experiments that reinforce the band’s grindingly slow but still perceptible evolution.

Normally I’m not a guy who likes to take quotes from a press release, but this is Fenriz we’re talking about, so please enjoy these tasty bon mots from the man himself concerning the album:

“Prehistoric is a loose term. I just figure it’s our VIBE, our take on things and it’s more a statement that we use old style to create something new…It means that we are metal. With very loud guitars. “Frightfully barbaric but not without finesse”, I call it”

With that out of the way, let’s jump straight into the music. The band have stated Pre-Historic Metal was an attempt to tighten up and charge ahead with compact, heavy songs, and opening track “They Found One Of My Graves” fits the bill, immediately bursting out of the gate with chugging guitars and a thrash attack that easily moves between genres with a fluidity missing from previous outings, feeling cohesive while still making good on that “not without finesse” remark with an ending that goes psychedelic doom with some killer guitar and synth work. This might be some of the best tones the pair have gotten to date, a huge credit to their continued work with Ole Øvstedal and Silje Høgevold at Chaka Khan Studios.

From there we hit the title track and then it’s on to “Siberian Thaw” which slows the pace down to the band’s beloved doom tempo, trading slow dirges with galloping triplets and glorious pick slides. “Deeply Rooted” trades in trad to sublime results, and at the midway point, Pre-Historic Metal feels like a culmination of everything Darkthrone have been doing in this segment of their evolution, even as I laugh at the “Really!” shouted at the song’s end. “The Dry Wells of Hell” treads the same path, solid riffing with a classic heavy metal touch that rises and falls in a swamp of bones.

But you can’t leave a Darkthrone record without at least one curve ball, and for me it’s the instrumental “So I Marched To The Sunken Empire.” The short dirge at under four minutes has the regal majesty of a song three times its length. Again, the lead tone Ted gets out of his (I’m guessing) signature guitar is phenomenal, and if you couldn’t guess at the glee the band is having in the studio, Fenriz’s laugh at the end of the recording should clue you in.

Pre-Historic Metal closes with the 1-2 punch of rocker “Eat Eat Eat Your Pride” and “Eon 4”, continuing the band’s use of the melodic structure in new and interesting ways, this time adding Fenriz’s wailing vocals over the former instrumental. It may just be another day for Darkthrone, another monstrous inhalation and exhalation from the bearded grandfathers of the metal scene.

For us, it’s the bracing whistle of a cold wind. A slab of earth ripped away to expose the bones of a thing larger than we can comprehend.

Unexplainable.

Like the album cover.

What…you thought I wasn’t going to mention the cover?

– Chris

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Pre-Historic Metal is available now from – where else? – Peaceville Records. For more information on Darkthrone, check out their Facebook and Instagram pages.