Rating: 8 / 10 Stars
DARKTHRONE is: Fenriz (Drums, Vocals, Bass, and Guitars) and Nocturno Culto (Vocals, Guitars, Bass, and Drums)
REVIEW – There are bands that age by modernizing, bands that age by refining, and then there is DARKTHRONE, a band that has spent decades making regression feel like its own form of evolution. On Pre-Historic Metal, set to arrive May 8, 2026 through Peaceville Records, the Norwegian duo of Fenriz and Nocturno Culto continue their long, stubborn, glorious refusal to treat metal as something that must be polished, streamlined, optimized, or explained to anyone who arrived late. Peaceville describes the album as eight tracks of “primitive metal” with an organic sound and the ever-present spirit of the ’70s and ’80s, recorded at Chaka Khan Studios in Oslo with production work by Ole Øvstedal, Silje Høgevold, and Mads Luis.
That phrase, Pre-Historic Metal, is not merely a title. It is a manifesto written in rust. Darkthrone are not interested in nostalgia as decoration. They are interested in older forms of metal as living material: heavy metal before it became over-professionalized, doom before it became boutique, thrash before it became athletic branding, punk before it got archived, black metal before it became a museum of itself. This is not primitive because it lacks intelligence. It is primitive because it understands instinct.
The opening “They Found One of My Graves” feels like a one-way ticket to the ’80s metal cemetery, with the soil still wet and the headstones leaning at bad angles. The song carries a riff-heavy charge that immediately places the listener in Darkthrone’s late-era wheelhouse: not the frozen minimalism of the early black metal classics, but the dirtier, beer-stained, leather-jacketed collision of old heavy metal, punk, doom, and thrash that has defined so much of the band’s modern wilderness. The synthesizer detour gives it a supernatural edge, less polished horror soundtrack than cursed VHS interference flickering at the edge of a rehearsal-room nightmare.
The title track, “Pre-Historic Metal,” sharpens the album’s identity with almost comic directness. Darkthrone have never been afraid to say exactly what they are worshipping, mocking, or resurrecting, and here the phrase lands like an old denim vest thrown across a gravestone. There is a joy in the bluntness. This is metal before discourse, before algorithmic subgenre anxiety, before every riff needed a press-release thesis. It is heavy because the riff says so. It is ugly because ugly is honest. It is old because old things still bite.
“Siberian Thaw” stretches outward with a colder, slower menace, suggesting the band’s continued love of pacing as atmosphere. Darkthrone are often discussed in terms of rawness, but their sense of space is just as crucial. They know when to let a riff trudge, when to let the frost crack, when to make repetition feel less like limitation and more like weather. The title suggests something ancient beginning to move again, ice loosening around buried matter, a thaw that does not promise warmth so much as exposure.
“Deeply Rooted” feels like a phrase Darkthrone could apply to their entire existence. This band is deeply rooted in the underground, in stubbornness, in old records, in refusal, in the belief that metal history is not a ladder but a swamp full of bones, amps, bad attitudes, and half-remembered riffs worth dragging back into daylight. The track appears to lean into that grounded quality, the sense of something growing downward rather than upward. Darkthrone’s late-period work has often sounded like music made by people who no longer need to prove anything, and that freedom gives even their roughest turns a strange authority.
“The Dry Wells of Hell” is one of the album’s most evocative titles and, according to the material surrounding the record, one of its strongest mid-paced collisions of thrash and doom. Fenriz’s vocal performance reportedly brings inspired character to the song, and that matters because Darkthrone’s vocals have always been less about pristine delivery than personality, texture, and belief. A dry well in hell is a perfect Darkthrone image: no relief, no water, no salvation, just a hole where mercy should have been. The music, plodding and thrashing by turns, seems built to honor that emptiness without romanticizing it.
“So I Marched to the Sunken Empire” arrives as an otherworldly instrumental, and the title alone suggests the album’s most cinematic descent. Darkthrone instrumentals have a way of feeling like interludes from some imaginary underground fantasy film that never made it past the VHS-trading stage. Here, the march toward a sunken empire feels less heroic than doomed, a journey into ruins nobody asked to be excavated. In the context of Pre-Historic Metal, it works as a passageway, a strange old-metal corridor between riff monuments.
Then comes “Eat Eat Eat Your Pride,” a title that sounds like a command barked from a crust-punk pulpit. The track reportedly twists through dizzying metal-punk and gothic interludes, which is exactly the sort of crooked structural instinct that keeps Darkthrone’s old-school obsession from becoming predictable. Fenriz and Nocturno Culto have always been students of metal’s weird corners, not just its canonical highways. A song like this suggests appetite, humiliation, self-consumption, and the kind of bitter humor that runs through so much of the band’s personality. It is not enough to fall. You must chew on your own arrogance while you do it.
The closer “Eon 4” carries special weight because it continues a suite stretching back to Soulside Journey, Darkthrone’s 1991 debut. That connection matters. For all the band’s legendary black metal rupture in the early ’90s, Soulside Journey remains part of the foundation: the death metal beginning before the snowstorm, before the necro-production mythos, before A Blaze in the Northern Sky changed the temperature of extreme music. “Eon 4” suggests Darkthrone not as a band looking back sentimentally, but as a band treating its own history like an old tunnel that still leads somewhere strange. Peaceville’s track listing confirms “Eon 4” as the album’s final track.
What makes Pre-Historic Metal compelling is how little it seems to care about being impressive in the modern sense. It is not trying to be the most extreme Darkthrone album, the coldest, the rawest, the fastest, or the most shocking. It is trying to be Darkthrone in 2026: two lifers digging through the pre-digital graveyard of metal instinct and dragging out whatever still smells alive. The riffs are the point. The atmosphere is the point. The refusal is the point.
Darkthrone’s 2026 context gives the album extra weight. Peaceville notes that the year marks 40 years since the band’s initial formation under the name Black Death, making Pre-Historic Metal not just another chapter, but another act of endurance from one of underground metal’s most stubbornly influential forces. There is no victory lap here, no grand mainstream-friendly celebration of legacy. Darkthrone celebrate history by disfiguring it, by playing old metal like it has been left in a shed with mold, dust, and a working amplifier.
The beauty of this band is that their limitations are often indistinguishable from their principles. Darkthrone do not sound “timeless” because they transcend eras. They sound timeless because they distrust the future. Pre-Historic Metal seems ready to continue the line from It Beckons Us All into another primitive, organic, riff-obsessed slab of underground worship. It is heavy metal stripped back to attitude, memory, instinct, and the creaking joy of old machinery still doing damage.
With Pre-Historic Metal, Darkthrone are not reinventing themselves. They are not supposed to. They are carving another mark into the same old stone, and somehow the stone still bleeds. This is a record for those who understand that metal’s past is not dead material. It is a graveyard full of things that keep climbing out.
For more information on DARKTHRONE, visit:
www.Peaceville.com/Bands/Darkthrone
www.Facebook.com/DarkthroneOfficial
www.X.com/Darkthrone90
www.Instagram.com/DarkthroneOfficial
www.YouTube.com/@Darkthrone
www.Spotify.com/Artist/Darkthrone