To celebrate the release of the epic new Darkthrone album, Eternal Hails, out now on Peaceville Records, the band have released a video for the album’s opening track “His Masters Voice”
The animated lyric video created by Matthew Vickerstaff, has been inspired by the album’s stunning artwork that features the piece “Pluto and Charon” (1972), from renowned science fiction artist David A. Hardy; a hugely inspirational image for both Fenriz & Nocturno Culto spanning several decades, and this also stands as a symbolic link between the genre-bending styles apparent on Darkthrone’s earliest works, to those same traits evident on Eternal Hails.
The Norwegian black metal legends, show that within five tracks and 45 minutes on their 19th album, Eternal Hails, they remain defiantly and eternally Darkthrone.
On Eternal Hails, the longer, doomier songs reflect drummer Fenriz’s love of doom, taking their time to make their point. For Fenriz, what he and co-conspirator Nocturno Culto have concocted stretches back even further than discovering black metal, to the sounds of the ’70s and the more freewheeling sounds of bands playing with more expansive themes. This didn’t just make the songs longer, it made them an entirely different beast from the ground up.
Lyrically, Eternal Hails follows previous Darkthrone concepts, in that it has no concept. Each song stands alone, words and music done separately, until such a time as one needs to find the other.
Fenriz explains “As I write lyrics that have a life on their own these days (again), there is no concept of them to match the songs themselves,” says Fenriz. “The lyrics collect dust while we make the songs, and then Ted needs the lyrics for his vocals in the studio and he gets them then. So I have no idea what song is going to be called what until I come back to the studio after the vocals are done. Again, with us it is coincidental. The lyrics did not inspire any of the songs or songwriting. When we make the songs it is a matter of just trusting our lives in heavy metal and – BOOM! – create, create, create, and then put the pieces together.
