With their second album, the Norwegian band of Darkthrone made their shift away from the death metal of Soulside Journey and into full-on black metal, with grainy-sounding guitar, fairly fast-paced bass, drums mixed for hardness and penetration over fullness, and vocals which gnash, growl, and howl.  Despite the group’s role (alongside their contemporaries) in helping to define black metal’s archetypes for audiences outside the Scandinavian countries, the album goes against and outside those later conventions in some interesting ways.

The lengthiness of its songs (the opening track, “Kathaarian Life Code“, runs over ten minutes, and the shortest, the title track, coming in just under five) is one of the more immediately obvious examples, but the song-writing itself lends further instances, including the willingness to settle into grooves lasting more than ten seconds, slowed smearing of guitar tones, and breakdowns with weight to their direction past just brief build-up.

The punk influence is also much more evident than in a wide cut of black metal bands later in the decade, particularly in the drum-work, and aspects which would be explored further by the band’s followers, such as past-speed-metal savage soloing and the use of acoustic guitar for abrupt counter-point, crop up in quick but intriguing ways.  As rough as the guitar buzz makes it seem, the album also comes off as fully realizing its intent, or at least close enough to handily cover up the few fumbles.  Dark, harsh, thoroughly aggressive, and fully its own beast.

Here’s the original cover art.