You may say what you want but Darkthrone are explorers. Besides being black metal legends who released couple of milestone albums in black metal genre they decided to explore metal and musical boundaries and not giving a fuck what anybody thinks about that. Main occupation of Darkthrone’s music last couple of years is 80ies metal with Fenriz being an absolute encyclopedia of metal and underground. For me personally, the best phase in last couple of years of so, was more melodic punky crust phase with Circle The Wagons coming to mind immediately. On to this opus. This one contains seven songs, with one called Koboltn, West Of The Wast Forests being eerie piano synth instrumental. On this opus Darkthrone mix eighties metal with doom metal slower side of things but retaining enough melody in guitar riffs to keep songs interesting and good listening. My personal favorites are Eon 2 having such nice main guitar melody, also Kevorkian Times. There are no blast beats on this album, but there are synth parts smartly thrown in some songs, also acoustic atmospheric parts and varied yet hypnotic riffing topped with Nocturno Culto’s trade mark voice. Maybe it takes couple of listenings to get to love this album, but once you do it, it is superb like all Darkthrone releases.

8/10