The two Norwegians who had once frozen the whole second wave into a single tremolo riff spent October 2007 to July 2008 in their own Necrohell II, Nocturno Culto recording, engineering and mixing, Fenriz writing half the songs and drumming on all of them, and Peaceville released Dark Thrones and Black Flags in Britain and Europe on 20 October 2008, the third record of their punk and heavy metal turn and the first on which the black began to crack the punk's floor. The flag is in the title. So is the throne.
The division of labour is printed in the credits. Fenriz sings, plays guitar and drums; Nocturno Culto sings and plays guitar and bass. Fenriz wrote the music for "The Winds They Called the Dungeon Shaker", "Hiking Metal Punks", "Hanging Out in Haiger", the instrumental title track and "Witch Ghetto"; Culto wrote "Death of All Oaths (Oath Minus)", "Blacksmith of the North (Keep That Ancient Fire)" and "Launchpad to Nothingness"; the two share "Norway in September" and "Grizzly Trade". The sleeve credits Culto with the mixing and, with characteristic modesty, as having "hard(ly) produced" it.
Fenriz described their records of this period as "35- or 40-minute long demos" to Terrorizer in September 2008, and the description is accurate in every sense but the dismissive one.
The formula of F.O.A.D. continues, but the weather has changed. Darkthrone in 2008 still play crust, speed metal and the heavy metal of the early eighties with a garage door left open, yet this record is darker and more severe than its predecessor, the punk less obvious, the old black metal frost creeping back along the edges of the riffs like ice closing over a fjord in November. How much punk remains is the record's open question. Less than the name of the turn suggests.
"The Winds They Called the Dungeon Shaker" opens the album on its best riff, a war cry that cuts through the speakers like an axe through birch, and spends its lyric on the scene itself; the song loses some of its grip after that opening, but the riff alone justifies it. "Hiking Metal Punks" is the catchiest thing here, and, in a band that has never apologised for a joke, it is exactly about what its title says.
The roughness is policy, not accident. Recorded in their own room, mixed by one of the two men who played on it, the album sounds like rehearsal tapes dragged out into a winter field and left to harden, and Fenriz made the intent explicit in the same interview: "I haven't practised since '93, just to get that sloppy." The drums lurch, the guitars snarl, and the whole thing hits like a sledge on a frozen door rather than a precision charge. That is the sound they chose, and on the best songs it is the right one.
The punk is still there. The frost has simply come back for it.
"Norway in September" is the summit, Culto's ghostly, wavering lead laid over a song that sounds like the country it names when the light starts to go, and it is the clearest bridge between the band they had become and the band they once were. "Death of All Oaths (Oath Minus)" opens on a thrash riff and later breaks down into a passage that recalls the band's own death metal beginnings. "Grizzly Trade" and "Launchpad to Nothingness" slow the pace toward doom and grind it into the ground.
The weaknesses are as plain as the strengths. The vocals are the weakest element of the record, drowned in reverb or chanted off the note, and the two singers are hard to tell apart. The instrumental title track is two and a half minutes that go nowhere, a placeholder where a statement should stand. A record called after its own throne should not leave the throne empty.
For anyone who followed the band into its punk years, this is the most rewarding of the three records of that turn, and "Norway in September" and "The Winds They Called the Dungeon Shaker" stand with anything they recorded that decade. For those who want Transilvanian Hunger back, it will sound like a demo. It is a demo, in the sense Fenriz meant: rough by choice, and sharper than it pretends.