Album Review : Darkthrone - Astral Fortress (2022)
Fenriz once explained in a documentary (I don’t remember which one) that Darkthrone is making bread. Other bands like Dimmu Borgir are making cake or whatever, but what he does is simpler, more direct. I couldn’t explain Darkthrone better myself, but I believe Fenriz has always sold his own creativity short. Along with his partner in crime Nocturno Culto, they’ve always been experts at distilling and blackening different sounds. The band is capable of a crazy level of nuance within narrow parameters.
If Darkthrone is bread, their new record Astral Fortress is one of their finest pieces of sourdough, doused in truffle oil.
For fifteen years or so, Darkthrone has been reverse-engineering their own musical legacy and giving the black metal treatment to styles that influenced them from crust punk to old school doom metal. Astral Fortress is no different in that regard, except that it revisits a much bolder foundational style: hard rock. Because of that, Astral Fortress is a lot slower paced and relies on more unlikely instrumentation than its predecessors. Keyboards, acoustic guitars, it gets weird and fun really fast.
Astral Fortress is anchored by ten minutes long prog rock-infused monster goofily titled The Sea Beneath the Seas of the Sea. It’s one of the strangest, most awesome songs Darkthrone has ever written. Bookended by slow, gooey riffs, it slams into a monolithic, inevitable march of doom. The hybrid of Uriah Heep prog dock, doom and black metal on this song is entirely original and it’s perhaps the only song on the record well served by Nocturno Culto’s faded, reverb drenched voice. It hits that Lovecraftian feel.
The first single Caravan of Broken Ghosts is another long, oddly shaped sonic missile that incorporates acoustic guitar in its intro to enhance its stark, contemplative nature. Fenriz’s bombastic drum work and the soulful, tormented riffs are somewhat new to Darkthrone's musical vocabulary. At least in this context. It took me a couple listens in order to warm myself up to it. The fast bridges are also a nice, unexpected surprised in this lumbering dinosaur of a song. It's a fascinating study on how tempo affects mood.
The most conventional song on Astral Fortress is definitely Kevorkian Times, which feels like an outcast from a previous record. It builds off a fun, quasi-melodic riff and transitions in a very quick almost punk-like trademark Darkthrone tempo. While it is one of the least interesting (if not THE least interesting) song on Astral Fortress, it is also a nice change of pace that gives the record more scope and nuance. It also helps you appreciate the depth of Fenriz and Nocturno Culto’s experimentation.
My favorite song on Astral Fortress after The Sea Beneath the Seas of the Sea is the closer Eon 2. Inspired by traditional heavy metal, it is an ambitious mess of epic old school guitar riffs that will take you back to the days of Anvil, Running Wild and other forgotten glories. Revisiting and reappreciating the past is really one of the best aspect of the post-The Cult is Alive Darkthrone. It is haunted music in the best, most sophisticated way. Fenriz and Nocturno Culto reappropriate and elevate the best parts of our musical past.
There is no real bad song on Astral Fortress. Stalagmite Necklace and awesomely named Impeccable Caverns of Satan are a little more riff salad-y, but still have this playfulness that is so crucial to the record’s spirit. The instrumental Kolbotn, West of the Vast Forest is such an underrated cut with the echoing piano and cavernous drums. Halfway between dark ambient and something Swans would make, it enhances the Lovecraftian atmosphere the Norwegian duo is going for. It would make a great live intro.
Whether you love them or hate them, Darkthrone have really developed an inimitable aesthetic over the years. They are not quite taking themselves seriously (fuck, one of the guys is ice skating on a lake on the cover), but they use heavy metal heritage with such gusto and confidence, the pertinence of their approach is indisputable. The guys are and will forever be pathologically themselves, but they cracked the code. They own the game. They found an endless well of inspiration.
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Astral Fortress is not really a revolution in Darkthrone’s sound, but it’s Fenriz and Nocturno Culto definitely being their best selves and living their best lives. It’s a grim, haunted record, but it's also playful and creative within the ridiculously narrow musical paradigm they crafted for themselves. It's plundering a vastly forgotten era ofd the past in order to create something new. I really love this record. I haven’t been this enthusiastic for a Darkthrone release since The Cult is Alive, really.
