DARKTHRONE's FENRIZ Discusses Upcoming Album

U.K.'s Terrorizer magazine recently conducted an interview with Fenriz (real name: Gylve Fenris Nagell),the drummer and lyricist of the two-piece Norwegian black metal band DARKTHRONE. An excerpt from the chat follows below.

Terrorizer: So where are you at with the next DARKTHRONE album?

Fenriz: We recorded six songs; we have to do like three more, I think. So we basically have three-fourths of the album done and we started writing for that, at least I did, in June last year so it overlaps. People look at it like we have several releases but for us it's just one big tune and we cut it off as we go along.

Terrorizer: Sort of like a sausage machine, you feed the music in one end and the label makes a string of individual sausages?

Fenriz: Oh, but that sounds really soulless. [Laughs] We're really doing something important these days with the direction and the whole metal-punk thing. Now I'm writing songs that are like... you can imagine a mix of metal-punk and AGENT STEEL in 1985 and MOTÖRHEAD in '79 to '83 — awwwwww, yeah! There're a lot of people out there that're really into old-style stuff, but with DARKTHRONE I'm really nervous now for doing too much out of the metal-punk thing, and suddenly that's a trend, because I've been through the thrash and death, and certainly the black metal thing. It's the slowest style of music [to pick up] since MOTÖRHEAD and MOTÖRHEAD are really the only famous band for doing that style and what'll happen now we're tied up to it? We shall see! I hope we won't destroy it! Or [defunct British speed metallers] WARFARE will reform and kick our asses.

Terrorizer: Are you fast running out of things to explore?

Fenriz: I don't really look at it like we're moulding into something totalitarian when it comes to styles, if you look at it the way you're supposed to do, which is the truth, we didn't change overnight. How much death metal is there on "A Blaze In The Northern Sky"? Loooooads, there're no abrupt changes, there might be changes in the image and black and white cover and whatnot, but what the hell does that have to do with music, really? So the style now is changing really slowly too, because I'm making almost 50 percent of the music these days, so what Ted [Nocturno Culto] is doing is something completely different and he hasn't really thought about doing metal-punk at all I think. He's making his stuff and I'm making mine, and sometimes, he makes a song that sounds like I made it and I make a song that sounds like he made it. We're an unruly crowd, what can I say? If you're asking whether we have any styles left to explore, then it sounds like we have a plan, but that's completely untrue — we don't have a plan at all, it's just what happens. We're not control freaks, we're just winging it all the time.

Terrorizer: It sounds like making music just for the pleasure of making music.

Fenriz: Well, we have day jobs. I've had mine since 1988, so we don't sit around twiddling our fingers and making a lot of bad choices for what to do or what not to do, we can say no all the time because we have a bottom line economy. We refuse to let DARKTHRONE become our jobs, we're serving the underground, we're one of the alternatives and I guess we're one of the few with the old sound who are a "known" band — most other "known" bands have a really modern studio sound. It's a great sadness but it's our great strength, at least for us these days. But it was worst in 1999 than it is now, even the underground sucked!

Read the entire interview at www.terrorizer.com.