Peaceville – 8th May 2026
Christopher Nosnibor
The arrival of Pre-Historic Metal marks forty years of Fenriz and Nocturno Culto’s musical collaboration, initially as Black Death, the album’s back cover proudly boasting ‘No metronome since 1987’. The images which accompany the lyrics in the CD’s booklet depict damp logs, thick, verdant moss, and the centrepiece is a misty shot of what appears to be the remains of a stone circle – or just a rocky clearing – in a forest, where the band are lurking, shadowy figures in the background. It’s all a fair indication – or forewarning – of what Pre-Historic Metal, an album pitched as ‘the new studio album of primitive metal from the Norse cavemen’ is all about.
As Fenriz himself proclaims of the title’s symbolic origin, “Prehistoric is a loose term. I just figure it’s our VIBE, our take on things and it’s more a statement that we use old style to create something new”. It sets their stall out nicely, and prepares the listener for precisely what Darkthrone deliver, which is, quite simply, forty-one minutes of relentless, riff-driven metal.
There are twists and turns galore during each and every song, opener ‘They Found one of My Graves’ packing in some well-placed breakdowns and flourishes into its five and a quarter minutes, wedging these moments tight between the thunderous overdrive and gnarly guttural vocals, drawing together elements of Black Metal and Thrash in a completely natural fashion. The title is a hell-for-leather blast of blistering overload, which suddenly becomes a doomy pagan ritual, the commanding vocals booming through cavernous reverb amidst a chthonic growl of barbarically brutal guitar.
The seven-minute ‘Siberian Thaw’ takes the basic principles of a grunge riff and slows it to a glacial crawl, adding some Sabbath-influenced doom drone to its sludgy trudgery. And yes, they do the thing of picking up the pace to that of a solid headbang before bringing the riff back slow and low and denser than before. It’s a tried and tested template, and they play it to perfection, spinning a meandering prog mid-section before blasting in with the pulverizing grind segment that makes you go ‘hell yes!’ before, of course, finally, going back to the starting point.
The album’s second six-minute epic, ‘The Dry Wells of Hell’ plays out a delicate, atmospheric intro, and strikes a more theatrical stance all round, pitching some bold, soaring vocal melodic moments amidst the demonic snarling and the vibe is unmistakably and unashamedly vintage. But the joy of Pre-Historic Metal is that it’s not specifically one thing or another, but a curated catalogue of metal. And they don’t put a foot wrong.
Sure, if you’ve listened to enough metal, you’ve heard it all before, in various permutations, but that’s the point. Pre-Historic Metal is about execution rather than innovation, and every single riff lands in a way that absolutely hits the spot.
AA
Aural Aggravation 