FUCK OFF AND DIE

When I'm old, I want to be a Darkthrone, because, goddamn, that band kicks ass so fucking much. Just listen to "Whiskey Funeral". That (muddy) gemstone of a song says it ALL. "Fucking forced to sleep in this life/Enough time to be sober in death" – feels good, man.

Darkthrone are so badass it makes my nose bleed and my dick hard when I think about it. What greater answer is there to being criticized (although Darkthrone don't really face criticism, but rather ignorance, imbecility and whiny nostalgia) than to persistently do the opposite of what people expect you to do. I wouldn't be surprised if their next release would be an album of child songs' remixes, or Fenriz farting. I'd fucking buy it. I'd get the album title tattooed.

It amazes me that there are still people around who find it necessary to utter something else about this band than exalted anthems of praise.

But yes, there are indeed people who still bitch and moan about what great music Darkthrone used to make back in the days, what an outrage it is that they play punk now and added guitar solos to their sound, how much it sucks that Fenriz is a techno DJ besides recording FBA (far-beyond-awesome) punk black metal records and how sad it made them when they first noticed they felt sexually attracted to men.


Darkthrone even called an album FUCK OFF AND DIE to make sure you get the message, and still you seem to find so much solace in being a pain in the ass that it doesn't matter much to you that no one cares about your piteous utterances of gayness.

One of the main reasons for Darkthrone's greatness are the riffs. Very few bands can compete with this band's count of killer riffs. Those are riffs that are not only great, but come disquietingly close to Slayer's "Raining Blood", which features the all-time greatest guitar riffs of all time.

I remember hearing "Natassja in Eternal Sleep" from UNDER A FUNERAL MOON for the first time. I was then in an adolescent-melancholic/romantic/suicidal phase. The music that at first sight corresponded to those feelings disappointed me at first hearing as too obvious, too mellow, too orientated at 14 year old anorexic (or bulimic) girls slitting their wrists. In short, too gay. I needed something else.

I didn't have a fucking clue. I was 16. I was sitting in a dark room and suddenly heard something that sounded like a rawer, darker, colder, meaner version of TRBNGR, stripped of their sense of humour. That sound. That voice. That resonance.

The words. The riffs. The greatness.

What insane, INSANE riffs they played. I had never heard anything like it. I didn't know music could be so minimalisitic, atonal and yet grandiose. And that was the first lesson Darkthrone teached me: Never judge a book by its cover. And reviews. The world is full of idiots. Few only sense gretaness when they find themselves confronted with it.


UNDER A FUNERAL MOON remains the best album Darkthrone have recorded to date. Next time they came remotely close to that album's dilettantish finesse was with 2003's HATE THEM.

Now what is to be venerated most on this album is the incredible amount of hate it contains. Anaal Nathrakh and Nattefrost try hard to reach HATE THEM's hate level, but they're not even close. What they make is just very evil music, whereas HATE THEM is a tsunami of hate. A hailstorm of hate. An amok run of hate. Darkthrone beat you unconscious with hate. This is TRUE HATE. Who gives a shit about true black metal? GIVE ME TRUE HATE.

If you're an idiot, you probably thought Dakrthrone couldn't surpass HATE THEM. Obviously, you were wrong. They did surpass HATE THEM and they didn't even need a whole album to do so. They recorded a whole album anyway, but one song from it was all it needed to bludgeon HATE THEM into oblivion: "Sjakk Matt Jesu Krist", the hate anthem par excellence. "Hammerslag på hammerslag", motherfucker. Where is your God now? Yeah, they beat "Raining Blood". They wrote and recorded the greatest, most badass monster god tier killer riff of all time.


Since they couldn't beat a riff that beat "Raining Blood", because it would be very much like trying to count further than infinity, Darkthrone decided to step a step away from black metal and do something else instead of, like most bands, trying too hard and fail. For the second time in their career, they created their own genre. While it was black metal the first time, they now chose to create black classic heavy metal punk, rocking your ass to pieces at the intersection between witlessness and genius, celebrating THE RIFF and THE HATE.

A further trademark of Darkthrone's awesomeness is their guitar sound. No other band has ever managed to produce something coming remotely close to that freezingly cold, face skinning sound. Not even Immortal. And the rawness of it... It's the sound of car crashes, colliding icebergs and frenzied misanthropy turned into riffs. Played loud enough, you could skin animals with it and make Africa freeze over. Some call it underproduced, I call it overbadass.

Darkthrone are so badass it's hard to find words to describe it. Compared to Darkthrone, GG Allin, who achieved one of the all-time highest levels of badassery, is just a shit-besmeared faggot trying too hard.


I can't imagine Darkthrone eating anything else than raw meat. They hardly ever sleep, except when they're too drunk to stay awake, but I doubt that happens very often. These guys have an awesome resistance to alcohol. They could drink Lemmy under the table hands down. When Fenriz is only wasted, Polish professional alcoholics are already dead.

Sometimes, when it's very, very cold outside, Nocturno Culto and Fenriz will leave their unheated cabin in the middle of a recording session to go out into the blizzard, where they will whip each other's faces with barbwire and thorny branches, kick each other in the dick and utter inhuman screams. This serves as a warning to the hungry bears and wolves lurking in the nearby woods not to come any closer. It also makes the guys pissed off enough to achieve proper necro sound.

If however a wild beast happens to be bold or desperate enough to come closer to the cabin, the rumbling sound of badass black metal punk played inside splits its head like a baked potato. That is the way Darkthrone hunt.


Contrary to what many extreme metal puritanics out there believe, Darkthrone still play true black metal.

The so-called "true" black metal is to music what 4chan's oldfaggotry is to the internet. It is distinctive and apart from the mainstream, frightening and repellent, ridiculously grandiose, beautiful to few only and understandable to almost no one.

True black metal is an attitude, rather than a distict genre, a special sound or a look; it's untamed, immature hate and consistent resistance to contemporary deceitfulness; it's standing against a hurricane of shit with your fist in the air, for lost fervour, for metal and darkness and for the hell of it.

All hail Darkthrone.