Darkthrone - Old Star

After the widely appreciated return to their traditional black metal roots on their 2016 album, Arctic Thunder, Fenriz and Nocturno Culto are back with another, different kind of throwback this year with Old Star. Famed second wave black metal pioneers Darkthrone have managed to keep their output prolific in the new millennium by introducing elements of crust punk into their sound on several of their late-stage albums, much to the dismay of purist fans obsessed with Transylvanian Hunger, but for those appreciating of the band’s willingness to try new things while not taking themselves too seriously, albums like The Cult is Alive and Circle the Wagons are a bit of good fun that the genre definitely needs to increase its dosing of. While Arctic Thunder found the duo proving they could still harness their more traditional sound, Old Star finds them going back a little further into heavy metal’s history rather than just their own, and once again, the band’s freedom of artistic direction and long-worked chemistry together produces a tight, festive 38 minutes of old-school homages of various types blackened with their signature sear.

With just 6 tracks to its listing, Old Star is a compact, focused, yet surprisingly diverse offering of a lot of old and new. While still bearing the band’s gruff blackened heavy metal signature, the album is scattered with tons of elements and motifs that hearken back to the years of metal that predate Darkthrone. The slower riffs on the opening track, for example, feel like some of the band’s most Sabbath-inspired material yet. The main riff of “The Hardship of the Scots” sounds like it was taken straight out of a Judas Priest track, while its faster bridge section sounds like something off Black Sabbath’s Master of Reality, and the slow dirge of impending melodic guitar leads all over the spooky “Alp Man” sound more in touch with old-school doom than anything Saint Vitus managed to do this year. 

The band aren’t just pining for nostalgia the entire time, however, and the smart compositional adjustments to the various offshoots the band takes are definitely the album’s strongest asset, even if the stylistic time travel seems to be the aesthetic focal point. Even in the songs mentioned above, the band do a fie job incorporating the more old-school elements into their black metal expertise in complimentary ways, and songs like the title track and “Duke of Gloat” stay a little closer to the band’s black metal roots, with the latter channeling the depressive ambiance of the second wave particularly strongly.

The seven-and-a-half-minute closing track is probably the most holistic blend of the band’s black metal core with their recent fascination with classic heavy metal and old-school doom. As smooth as the rest of the album’s compositions are, the extended length on this song seems to provide just the necessary room for it to flow smoothly from old to new in the most natural and least jarring way possible.

As distracting as some of the retro-trips can be, the band mostly handles their incorporation into this album’s tributes rather well, and what motifs they do draw from metal’s earliest subgenres fit nicely and do indeed only serve to bolster the songs they’re being added to. Honestly, this probably is one of the best retro-focused albums I’ve heard in a long while and I’m glad Darkthrone went this route here. The writing is thoughtful, the production is fitting, and the performances are convincing; there’s very little other than nit-picking that could be said about this album to make it better. I don’t want to get too eager, but I don’t think I’d mind a second round of this type of album from Darkthrone in the future. Hats off to Fenriz and to Nocturno Culto.

Hey now, you’re an /10