Darkthrone
Old Star

How difficult it is to listen to metal when there are metalheads around, those who hate metalheads but listen to rubbish, and those who hate metal because of metalheads. With black metal, it's even more challenging not to seem like idiots, because you know, churches, Satan, Kristian Vikernes, ridiculous lyrics, poor English, awful logos, random farm animals... but the funny thing is that the musically more dignified black metal bands are precisely those who aren't satanic idiots but simple rockers who have played too much Super Castlevania IV for the SNES (did someone say Immortal?).

Another great black metal name that still produces good albums is Darkthrone. No, it's not true that they lost their edge after Panzerfaust. And they always had a lot of fun: that chuckle and that cowbell at the beginning of In the Shadow of the Horns speak for themselves. So, if something is contained in A Blaze in the Northern Sky, then it is automatically TRVE. However, if you tell me that the TRVE things are those contained in Aske by that scoundrel Burzum (on whose quality I have nothing to comment, by the way), then not only do I no longer want to be TRVE, but I wish you the same fate as Kristian Vikernes and to become a YouTuber.

Back to serious matters, Darkthrone taught us that having fun is TRVE, that a genre for excited teenagers like metal (all of it) without the freedom to do whatever the hell you want becomes something worthy of the depressed thirty-somethings writing nonsense under Mentana's Facebook posts, and above all that noise and sonic grime are added value in any record. So here comes Old Star, Darkthrone's seventeenth studio album released in 2019. And it's a good album. Let's welcome back this putrid black-tinged heavy metal (or heavy-tinged black metal), much more dynamic than most orthodox black, no Transylvanian buzz-saw guitars or blast-beats; too filthy to be just heavy, gone are the times of the falsetto of The Underground Resistance, and Nocturno Culto delivers his screaming here. Welcome, explicit doom slowdowns, welcome riffs borrowed from AC/DC, welcome nods to NWOBHM, welcome also to you, Celtic Frost, hanging on the recording studio wall like the Lares and Penates in Roman domus, but you were always there. A disc where thirty years of experience (and cruelty, why not) are poured in, where the primordial proto-black Fenriz listened to in high school takes on new forms and modern attire and returns to disturb the sleep of those who listen to Vampire Weekend.

Rating: TRVE/100