Darkthrone

5. Thou Art Lord – Thou Art Lord’s first logo was sort of a cross between the Mysticum and Mayhem’s logos. Not sure why they changed it—several times, in fact—to a dumb font or a hand-scrawled atrocity, but the Greek supagroup got it right. Just look at it! It’s Christ’s greatest foe. The symmetry and…

I have a pet hamster. His name is Ozzy. He is adorable but terrified of everything. However, over the course of his cohabitation with me, he’s become acclimated to the sounds of heavy metal, probably due to the fact that I play it for 16 hours a day. I’ve discovered that he actually has quite…

Gorehounds, gut-sifters, and comic book ghouls will no doubt be aware that Bay Area death metal titans Autopsy have been immortalized in in Feast for a Funeral, a band-authorised comic by E-Comix. As you’d expect from Autopsy’s generously gruesome back catalogue, and gather from the promotional video trailer for the comic [below], Feast for a…

We’re just not the types to go flocking to gallery openings and digest culture of a weekend but this is different. From 29th March to 29th April, the beyond-necro Neseblood Records are curating a black metal exhibition at Oslo’s Popsenteret, chronicling the history of black metal. Whether it is the extremity of the aesthetic or…

How does the commentary track thing work? Are you talking over the music in real-time or is the commentary track spliced in after it’s finalized? Fenriz: Lord have mercy! Just listening to Viking’s Do or Die album from ‘87 on vinyl and starting the interview. Well, it works like a commentary track on a movie—I…

When Darkthrone’s monumental epic, A Blaze in the Northern Sky, hit the shelves in 1991, it was an album of hesitant firsts: the first Norwegian black metal album (Mayhem’s Live in Leipzig came out earlier but with faulty distribution); the first major second-wave black metal album, globally (Czech group Master’s Hammer had released Ritual a year prior, but with less impact); the first truly blackened death metal album; and the first to chime DM’s death knell in popularity.