The verdict first, because it is the opposite of the received one. A Blaze in the Northern Sky is half a death metal album, its own drummer has said so in print, and it is the most consequential record of the Norwegian second wave anyway. Those two facts sit together perfectly well once you stop treating the album as a manifesto and start treating it as what it is, which is the sound of four musicians changing their minds in public with the studio already booked.
The band was Darkthrone, from a commuter town south of Oslo, and in the summer of 1991 they were a technical death metal group in good standing with an English label. The wider story of the shop, the doctrine and the people around them is the chapter this belongs to. This is about one album and the eight months that produced it.
What they were before
Peaceville had released Soulside Journey in January 1991, a fast, clean, properly played death metal record made at Sunlight Studio in Stockholm, which was the address every serious Scandinavian band of the period wanted. It did well enough. A second death metal album was written and partly recorded that same year, the material later issued as Goatlord, and studio time for it was already paid for.
Then they stopped. Not gradually, and not after an argument with the label: the band decided across a few months in 1991 that the music they had spent four years learning to play was the wrong music, and they threw away a booked album to make a different one. Nocturno Culto took lead guitar and vocals, Zephyrous played rhythm guitar, Fenriz drummed, and Dag Nilsen, who thought the whole change was a mistake, played the bass parts as a session musician and never appeared on a Darkthrone record again.
August 1991, and the money nobody mentions
The sessions ran through August 1991 at Creative Studios in Kolbotn, the same room where Mayhem had cut their EP four years earlier. The myth says the album sounds the way it does because the band had nothing. The band says otherwise: the budget for Soulside Journey had been a thousand pounds, and for this one they were given two and a half thousand, which is what allowed them into a studio they had wanted and could not previously afford.
Two and a half thousand pounds, and every extra penny of it spent on subtraction.
That single figure rearranges the whole story. What went onto tape was not the best sound available to the people making it. It was a sound they went and bought: the guitars thinned out until they behave like weather rather than like instruments, the drums set back in the room as though heard through a wall, the low end taken out of the record deliberately and the vocal moved from a growl to a shriek. Every one of those is a decision, and the money proves it, because a band with no options does not upgrade its studio in order to sound worse.
The label said no
Peaceville received the tapes and refused them. The stated objection was that the sound was too weak to release, which from a label that had built its name on doom and death metal was not an unreasonable commercial reading in 1991. The band's answer was to say they would take the album to Deathlike Silence Productions in Oslo instead, which was Euronymous of Mayhem operating a label out of a shop that did no trade, and Peaceville gave way and put out the record exactly as delivered. Euronymous was killed in August 1993, a year and a half later, and the threat that got this album released outlived the man behind it.
The first compact disc pressing ran to two thousand copies. It came out in February 1992, six months after the tapes were finished, and by the time a listener could buy it the band had already written most of the next one.
The album its author says it is not
The 3 pure black metal songs on it are "Kathaarian Life Code," "In The Shadow Of the Horns" (complete with Motorhead mid paced part and lots of Celtic Frost vibes as usual) and "Where Cold Winds Blow." The rest was really a lot of death metal with some black metal parts.
Fenriz of Darkthrone, Last Rites interview, September 2011
He is right, and the record is better for it. Three of the six pieces have fully crossed over; the rest are the technical band still audible underneath, riffs written for one genre and played in the manner of another. "Kathaarian Life Code" opens the album with ten minutes that establish nearly every convention the next decade would run on. "In The Shadow Of the Horns" is a Celtic Frost tribute with a mid paced section straight out of Motorhead. "Where Cold Winds Blow" is the coldest thing on it. Around those three sits a death metal album with the light turned off.
Fenriz has also called the material entirely a product of the eighties and said the only thing wrong with it is that it did not come out then, which makes this arguably the first retro record in metal: a group deliberately playing older, rougher and less skilfully than they were capable of, as a position rather than as a limit. That idea has since eaten half the underground. It starts here.
The three records it opens
| Album | Recorded | Where | Released | Style |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Soulside Journey | 1990 | Sunlight, Stockholm | January 1991 | Technical death metal |
| A Blaze in the Northern Sky | August 1991 | Creative Studios, Kolbotn | February 1992 | The changeover |
| Under a Funeral Moon | June 1992 | Creative Studios, Kolbotn | 1993 | The method, undiluted |
| Transilvanian Hunger | November to December 1993 | A bedroom, on four track | February 1994 | The method taken to its limit |
Read those four rows in order and the argument is visible in the middle column alone. A professional Swedish studio, then a small local one, then a bedroom: the direction of travel is away from every resource the band could reach, and each step was taken by choice while the money was going up rather than down. Zephyrous played on the first two of the black metal albums and was gone by 1994, and from Transilvanian Hunger onward Darkthrone were two men, which is what they have remained ever since.
What it settled
The record has kept its critical standing across three decades and across outlets with nothing in common. AllMusic reads it as a classic whose lo fi standards restarted an entire strain of the genre; Pitchfork scored it 9.2; Rock Hard gave it 9.0. It is the first of what the band's audience calls the unholy trinity, followed by Under a Funeral Moon in 1993 and Transilvanian Hunger in 1994, and of the three it is the least pure and the most useful, because it is the only one where you can hear the change happening rather than its result.
What it actually settled was that production is a position. Before this album a bad sounding record was a record made by people who could not afford better. After it, a specific set of removals became a language a band could speak on purpose and defend in an interview, and every argument about fidelity in this genre for the next thirty years traces back to a room in Kolbotn and a label that said no. The other side of that argument, made eighteen months later by a band who put keyboards and a full arrangement on top of the same method, is in the Nightside Eclipse.
