November 2026 AOTM: Panzerfaust by Darkthrone

Album of the Month: Panzerfaust - Darkthrone

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November is known by few as Nothing But Black Metal November, a play on the much more infamous Nut-based challenge. I won't be restricting my music taste in such a major way for the whole month but I will be posting two AOTM's in honour of it. And I couldn't do something like this without featuring Darkthrone, the band who've aged much better than their Norwegian peers in both musicality and in terms of controversy. Darkthrone are something of the go-to band for the 2nd Wave of Black Metal, they capture the rawness and infernal aggression of the scene in distinct riffs and strong songwriting better than any other group did. We're kicking the month off with my personal favourite record of theirs and their last truly classic album: 1995's Panzerfaust.

The Norwegian Black Metal scene came and went relatively quickly, with deaths and jailings doing the job of halting many groups where the paranoid sense of "selling out" hadn't already. Panzerfaust came near the middle of the period in 1995, but Darkthrone's rather middling output after the record would help to key-in the end of the scene altogether. As with most other of their records, the instrumentals of Panzerfaust were recorded entirely by Fenriz, with vocals performed by Nocturno Culto. The album expanded on the bands sonic identity by beefing up the guitar lines and slowing way down for an even more atmospheric and desolate sound.

A track like "Beholding the Throne of Might" takes the formula Fenriz had developed and perfected between A Blaze in the Northern Sky and Transilvanian Hunger, and turns the tempo down enormously. The main riff of the track is chugging and lumbering, it transforms the rawness of Nocturno's vocals and the lo-fi quality of Fenriz's instrumentals with patience and deliberateness. Rather than feeling abusive and hateful the tracks feel contemplative and emotive. "Quintessance" perhaps makes the best case for this increased intimacy, with its absolutely haunted vocals which seem ostracized by how completely indifferent the guitar and drums are to Nocturno's wails, continuing to churn along, with or without him.

This isn't to say the whole album is sitting at doom metal tempos, "Hans Siste Vinter" is a blistering swarm of tremolo and blast beats that refuses to let up through its near 5 minute run time. Nocturno's vocals are especially great on this track, hovering right between a croak and a growl and taking nearly all the attention away from Fenriz's static instrumentation.

Low production quality is arguably the hallmark of black metal, especially during the 1990s. Panzerfaust was recorded to a 4-track in Fenriz's apartment and due to its stripped-down instrumentals and layering it comes across perfectly comprehensible. We lost something in the genre when grandiosity became a mainstay in groups like Dimmu Borgir and Cradle of Filth, when the specificity of multiple simultaneous guitar lines began to muddle up the sonic airspace.

Panzerfaust also has an enormous tone to its guitar and bass, far from the thin and fragile sound found on earlier Darkthrone records. While the haze of its production and the rough quality of its distortion keeps individual notes obscured, the tone and direction is preserved. A modern band like 1914 might be heavy and aggressive and in-your-face, but it never quite sucks you into its groove like in the outro to "Quintessance" or "The Hordes of Nebulah". That's the biggest strength of Panzerfaust, it has all the ingredients of prior Darkthrone records with the restraint to slow down a little and focus.

-Paul Taylor

(Web Content Director at WXOU)