In Dennis Wheatley’s infamous novel The Devil Rides Out, the main character wards off evil by building a magic circle made of a pentacle, holy water, and dried mandrake, among other things. It is described as an “astral fortress.” Darkthrone’s Astral Fortress, on the other hand, is made of doomy riffs, a touch of cosmic keyboards, and decades of mastery. It conjures snowy landscapes, vast expanses of cold, and something I can’t help but describe as cozy: tried-and-tested recipes, old metal. The devil does ride out; the (black) magic is still there, fluttering and intact.

I got the chance to talk about it with Ted “Nocturno Culto” Skjellum, the discreet and iconic voice of the band, and this twentieth album turned out to be a pretext to revisit Darkthrone’s whole, stellar catalogue: Darkthrone has its own temporality, whether the rhythm slows down or accelerates, with its loops, echoes, and almost-anachronisms. Humble, with a no-nonsense attitude and a deadpan sense of humor, the musician mused on the threads running throughout their career: punk ethics, a sincere love for metal, and a strong partnership with his accomplice of old Fenriz. And first and foremost, an unwavering way to stay true to themselves, and go against the grain.

This interview took place in November 2022 and was first published on Radio Metal.

Astral Fortress was released a couple of weeks ago. How do you feel about it? Do you pay attention to how it’s received, or do you move on when it’s done?

I would basically say I move on. It was the same thing with A Blaze In The Northern Sky: back then, there was no internet to talk about it, so we didn’t really know what kind of impact that album had until the late nineties. Then we understood [chuckles]. It’s quite funny. Nowadays, I get more information through our label, and people seem to like it. Since the beginning, Fenriz and I appreciate that people actually understand what we’re doing—it shouldn’t be taken for granted. People seem to like Astral Fortress, some probably don’t… That’s life.

The pattern since we started is that when an album is released, we have already moved on to other things. It’s basically the case now: we are focusing on our next studio recording session in April [2023]. It will probably take a year to get released, though. This is what we do: we like to create music, and we like to record albums because that is what will be left of us when we are gone. It’s what we’re interested in, that’s what we’ve always done, and we will continue like that. The reason why we’re able to release our twentieth album is that we don’t play live. We use all our resources when it comes to the band for the albums, for making music. That’s why we are so effective. I mean, if we’d been a touring band, first of all, I guess we would have split up long ago because of differences and stuff like that… And besides, we feel like we’re just some kind of garden gnomes [laughs], we probably don’t belong on stage anyway.

You guys are very productive indeed: back in the early nineties you were releasing an album every year and it’s still the case now, Astral Fortress is out just one year after Eternal Hails……. Did you feel particularly productive during the COVID-19 pandemic? Many bands said it was a big change for them because they couldn’t tour, but for a band like yours, did it have any impact?

2021 was a recording year for Darkthrone, so Covid didn’t impact us at all. We live kind of moderate lives, so for us it was okay, but for the bands who have millions at stake… Being a live band is a business in itself. With the lockdowns, everybody living off of people meeting together was fucked, and that’s quite a lot of businesses. It wasn’t just live bands, it was basically everything.

You recorded these two albums in the Chaka Khan studio in Oslo. If I’m not mistaken, so far, you were recording in your own studio, doing most of the work yourselves. Why did this change, and what did it change concretely?

In late 2004, we bought our own studio again—we’d been talking about it for some time. I was in charge of buying equipment, and I spent a lot of time researching what would be the best thing for us. We started recording The Cult Is Alive in 2005, and for all the albums from this one to Old Star, I was in charge of the recording and mixing. The only album I didn’t mix was Old Star, we sent that one to America. From 2004 to 2012, it all went really smoothly, but the older you get, the more nervous you are about fucking things up, plus it was a lot of hassle to bring a lot of equipment with me—we recorded at a friend’s house up in the forest of East Norway. It started to get on my nerves, actually.

Arctic Thunder and Old Star were both recorded in the bomb shelter where we’d recorded the Thulcandra demo and “Snowfall”. It was fun to be back there, but after recording Old Star, the small community thing that owns that place in the cellar told Fenriz—he was in contact with them because he doesn’t live far away—that they had to throw everybody out there because of the air quality. It’s true that when we got down there in 2017 to record Arctic Thunder, it smelled exactly like in ‘88! There was something very odd about the air, so I understood, but then we didn’t have anywhere to go, we were kind of in limbo, as they say.

I think Fenriz got a tip about the Chaka Khan studio from a Norwegian band that recorded there—I can’t remember which one. I got in touch with the studio and talked to the person in charge of the equipment: I understood that this studio had a very analog profile, which really appealed to us. So we recorded Eternal Hails…… there, and I think we learned a lot from that recording session in many ways, both Fenriz and me and the two people working there. It was a nice experience, I think the time was right to find something else. It was a big relief for me because I could go to the studio and just be a musician, which is worth everything, actually. Eternal Hails…… became its own beast during its recording, so when we started working on Astral Fortress, we were more fine-tuned to what we really wanted out of the studio.

You also worked with two producers, Ole Ovstedal and Silje Høgevold…

Yeah, although I wouldn’t call them producers. We did try to work with a producer once many years ago, and it went straight down the drain after ten minutes: we don’t take orders from anyone, which was a problem. The two people working in the Chaka Khan studio have their own fields of expertise, but they gave us some nice input every once in a while. I think that’s really great, the cooperation between us was very dynamic and they probably think it’s easy to work with Fenriz and me because we’re open-minded. When we got in the studio, we found a lot of really great equipment, which gave us great ideas along the way for both Eternal Hails…… and Astral Fortress. We’ll go back to this studio again in April, it’ll be our third album recorded there.

Did having other people involved give you a different perspective on your music?

Not really, because the songs were written before we came to the studio. But since they have all the equipment available there, when you hear an echo effect on the vocals, it’s not a plugin, it’s a tape echo machine from the seventies. We used old equipment for delay and reverb, it’s harder to control properly, but that’s the fun of it. I think it’s always been this case with us: going into the studio is like jumping on the train, we just have to follow along, do our thing, and it becomes what it becomes sound-wise. People have to understand that if they don’t like Astral Fortress, they should listen to it again in fifteen years and judge it then, as we always say. Because people are accustomed to a very modern sound, even though there’s nothing interesting about it: it’s basically running the same system for every band, which is kind of boring.

I like to compare an album to a painting: the actual painting is the music and the frame is the sound. Of course, you can put a black plastic frame around it, it’ll probably work, but it’s kind of boring, isn’t it? It’s better to carve out little details in the frame so people can fully understand what we’re all about. It’s a big part of the overall thing we’re doing. On the back cover of the physical record, there’s a small sign that says: “No metronome since 1987”. We put it there just to try and explain what we’re about. For instance, the first riff of “Kevorkian Times” is much faster at the end; it’s because we don’t use a metronome. We like our songs to live their own life. We’re musicians, we have been doing this for many years so we know how to play, but we like to play our instruments together without a computer telling us how to do it.

If your albums are like a painting and the production is the frame, what did you have in mind for this Astral Fortress? What kind of image did you want to paint?

I think there are some coincidences, but what we really focused on this time was the guitar sound. Silje did a really great job on the drum sound for both this album and the previous one. In our minds, Astral Fortress and Eternal Hails…… were supposed to be like brothers, but it turned out they weren’t, actually—that’s life. At first, it’s important to get the drum sound and the guitar sound right; when they’re set, it’s time for recording. Bass is always a bit easier, it’s something to consider too, but it’s more important that the guitars and the drums sound right together. We managed to get what we wanted on Astral Fortress: you can hear the details in the guitars, whereas a lot of things were a bit drowned on Eternal Hails……. This one was for the people who have a keen ear, they can try to understand it. I have absolutely no idea how the next album will be, but I’m starting to get some images of it. From the signals I get from Fenriz and what I’m doing here, it should be interesting, at least.

You record the drums and the guitar live together, right?

Yes, that’s right. That kind of procedure has been going on for years and years, actually. I think it’s basically been like that forever, except for Soulside Journey because I remember playing a guitar lead to record the drums, which we dubbed afterward with a proper guitar sound. But yeah, otherwise we record one guitar and the drums together, and then I add the rest of the guitars and bass. I’m trying to convince Fenriz to play more bass, but…

He doesn’t want to?

Some day, maybe [chuckles]. In Darkthrone, it’s been the two of us for many years, we are pulling the load in the same direction, I think, and we pull it fifty-fifty, so what each of us does in the studio shouldn’t be so interesting. Personally, I’d like to have none of us credited for anything; we’re a band. But since we’re just two, people get hung up on knowing who’s doing what and which song is written by whom. It’s not so interesting to me, or it shouldn’t be, because as a band, we’ve released twenty albums together, we’re in the same boat. As I said, Fenriz and I are probably two garden gnomes, but we take music really seriously. I think it’s some kind of life project. I wouldn’t even be able to imagine what my life would be like today without the band. It’s a part of us. We started when we were fifteen or sixteen, and now we’re fifty. Fun fact, by the way: we were still in our forties when we recorded Astral Fortress.

So the next one will be the first album you did in your fifties?

Yeah, actually.

In that respect, you two seem to evolve at the same pace even without playing together that often—one of you could have decided to play straight-up black metal or punk stuff forever, and yet you’re still on the same page. How do you explain that?

That is actually very hard to explain because we don’t have any major plan. We had only once, and it was of course for A Blaze [In The Northern Sky]. Arctic Thunder is an album born out of Fenriz and I talking about the slight changes we should make because we felt that The Underground Resistance was our peak performance. Starting from, say, Dark Thrones and Black Flags, it builds up to this awkward song arrangement thing we have going on, and after The Underground Resistance, we decided this was what we should do: just slight changes. Not any kind of big deal, but make the arrangements a bit more understandable, a bit more streamlined. For us, it was great, and I think we are still on that path. Now, we’re actually starting to get closer to what we were doing as a demo band. On “Eon 2”, the last song of Astral Fortress, we come quite close to the “Snowfall” demo arrangement-wise. It’s strange. Maybe we’re the only ones who think so, but there’s something about it…

When we got our own studio and recorded our first album there, The Cult Is Alive, I remember the freedom we felt. It was totally mind-blowing. We just realized, “Okay, forget it, we are actually totally free, we can record whenever we want, the label doesn’t care…” The Cult Is Alive and F.O.A.D. have that feeling of freedom. The first song I wrote for The Cult Is Alive was “Too Old Too Cold”: it was a total awakening, we felt like we were seventeen again. We thought, “Let’s just break free of all the chains.” And we did.

I guess the title “Eon 2” is a nod to “Eon” from Thulcandra and Soulside Journey, the very beginning of your career…

Yes.

It does always sound like you’re very free in your approach, although you have quite a legacy behind you. How do you break free from that?

Oh, it was very easy because our mindset is rooted in the punk, hardcore scene. It’s always been like that: we always think that everything is kind of ridiculous [chuckles]. I think that’s why we carved our own path. It wasn’t difficult for us to break free, it was more of a relief. But break free from what? That’s the thing: every album we have done is important to us, I can remember every one of them and how our lives were around that time. I think that our albums are like a postcard from us to you about how our lives are. Maybe it’s a stupid thing to say but…

No, it makes sense!

I remember, for albums like Under A Funeral Moon, it was more strict and focused because we knew exactly what we wanted, and we got everything like we wanted… You can call it chains or not but sometimes, in some parts of your life, it’s good to be in chains because you learn something from everything.

Fenriz wrote the lyrics for Astral Fortress, as (almost) always with Darkthrone, but I think you did too a couple times, for Arctic Thunder for instance…

That’s right, I did. When it comes to writing lyrics, I have a different approach altogether than Fenriz, probably because of the huge differences in our lives. I have to have some kind of real-life experience to feed from when writing lyrics—then, I turn it into a lyrical thing. I remember writing lyrics for The Underground Resistance: back then, it came to me really easy. When there’s something I want to write about, I can put all my spikes into the lyrics. Those were meant for some specific people, but they don’t know about it [chuckles].

Fenriz is really gifted when it comes to lyrics. He’s a really funny guy. We were talking about ravens the other day, and how wherever they are, they create an instant atmosphere. There’s something about ravens, it’s just something else. He was pointing out that the opposite of ravens must be clowns [laughs], and I agree! We’ve been working together for a very long time, and I think that part of the recipe for sticking together for so long is not being a live band and keeping a healthy distance between us. We don’t interfere. We’re meeting sometimes, but very seldom, and almost only in the studio. I think both of us would like to meet a bit more often, but you know how life is—I’m not living anywhere near him…

What is it like to sing someone else’s words for so long?

I remember very vividly that when we started to rehearse for Soulside Journey, I told Fenriz, “It’s a privilege to sing these lyrics, they’re amazing. I don’t know where you got that talent from, but I like it!” It’s been the same ever since. The lyrics of Darkthrone are very important: I think it’s important for Fenriz to write them, they’re important to me, and to the overall Darkthrone experience as well. It’s always been like that, and it will always be. The lyrics on The Cult Is Alive kind of… maybe not made fun of the black metal scene, but some of them were kind of sharp about things that were happening back then. It was fun because some of the people who voiced out they didn’t like those lyrics were actually the people we were trying to smoke out [laughs]. We are very serious about what we’re doing, but we don’t take ourselves too seriously. Certain times call for some social experimentation, to see how people react. It’s not our main focus, but I think those lyrics are actually a fine example of how we broke free.

Talking about social experimentation: the artwork of Astral Fortress caused quite a lot of commentary online. Why this choice?

Initially, we were supposed to go for a completely different cover: we were going to use a painting from the seventies again, but this one was by an artist from Norway—an awesome painting. The artist agreed to it, but I think he wasn’t too sure about how to give someone the rights to use it, so he had a company in Norway that takes care of painters’ rights handle the negotiations. The whole contract situation was getting out of control, so I told the label, “Okay, let’s forget about this, we can’t do it.” I called the guy to apologize, which he was fine with, and that was it. But since Fenriz and I are constantly talking about these things, we knew we had hundreds of other options, there’s no limit to it. The actual picture you see on the cover of Astral Fortress was just a coincidence: somebody had taken that picture of this guy who was skating on the Kolbotn Lake—that lake is actually where Darkthrone started, it’s very close to home—and there’s something about the aesthetics of the image and the attitude of the guy on it that we really liked. We talked about it and knew that it would stir reactions, but we always first take the decision and talk about the impact it might have afterward. You can see that picture in many different ways, there’s a symbolic aspect to it, too. The people who want us to record Under A Funeral Moon 13 can see that the Panzerfaust backpatch is growing distant, the guy is actually skating away… There are many ways to interpret it, but the main idea is that it suits what we wanted to achieve with that album. The title as well, “Astral Fortress”, shows that we can use everything. Many people don’t realize it, but there’s an astral aspect to Darkthrone, too. That’s the way of life!

Fenriz points out a “Quintessence”—that he wrote for Panzerfaust—feel in “Caravan of Broken Ghosts”, that you wrote. Did you have it in mind at all when you were working on it?

No, because for the last ten-fifteen years at least, when I’m making music, I’m starting from scratch. I’m not listening to that much music, so it’s basically just what’s coming out of my mind. “Kevorkian Times” has a part in the middle of the song that must be, in retrospect, Morbid Angel-inspired, but these things just happen. I think “Quintessence” was the last song I had in mind when writing “Caravan of Broken Ghosts”. At the back of my mind, there was probably a bit of inspiration from Bathory, but on the other hand, other parts of the song don’t sound like Bathory at all. We are a band that mixes genres all the time; we’ve been doing that for years and years. Some people realize it, but not everybody. Even A Blaze In The Northern Sky is a mixed-genre album even if it has the aesthetics and the sound of black metal. But then again, what is black metal? I consider Don’t Break the Oath by Mercyful Fate black metal, actually. Black metal can be so much… I have no idea how people describe what we’re playing nowadays. I guess some call it black metal, others just metal. All we know is that what we play is metal.

You both write on your own, you have your own songs. How do you choose them? Do you comment on each other’s stuff, do you give the other pointers on how to play the songs, for instance?

Before we got into the studio for Eternal Hails……, I recorded my songs on guitar back home, I sent it to Fenriz, and we talked about the drums for each song. He’d sent me stuff as well because I have to learn what he plays so we can record it in the studio. It’s been very helpful actually to have these exchanges because when we get into the studio now, we have a head start and know what to do. But when we worked with our own equipment back in 2004, we always met up without hearing any of the other’s songs and had to learn them along the way. Everything was set up in the studio, we practiced the song until we could play it whole and then we just pressed “Record”. If it happens, it happens, usually on the second or third attempt. That’s how it captures the moment. I think the closest to live you’ll ever hear Darkthrone is on the albums.

That’s what I was thinking when I was listening to Astral Fortress: that you always choose a raw, organic approach so that it almost feels like we’re a fly on the studio’s wall, as a substitute for the gigs you don’t play.

Yeah, it’s like that. I think there are many ways of recording albums and making music, but Fenriz and I have always had our feet firmly planted into seventies rock. We listen to many different genres, but seventies rock is interesting in the sense that all bands didn’t sound the same back then. You had real studios, as I like to call them, and each had its own line of equipment, so they all sounded very different. Uriah Heep was nothing like Led Zeppelin, for instance, sound-wise. That’s the interesting part about the sixties, seventies, and eighties. Eighties metal bands all sounded different as well, Metallica didn’t sound like Voivod, and so on. They had completely different angles on everything. Interesting times!

Nowadays, it’s more homogeneous…

Yeah, it’s a bit sad. I personally think that bands should take more risks when it comes to recording, and what I’d really want—it’s basically a dream of mine—is to have Metallica use our own old Necrohell II studio. They’d have our equipment and record an album on that; I’d love to see what they’d do with it, that’d be really interesting.

Do you think they’d come up with something better than what they currently do?

I don’t know, but at least it’d be different. It’d leave them in charge and I think that approach is a bit more honest. But then again, a band like Metallica has a lot of mouths to feed, so they probably couldn’t do it anyway. But it’s an interesting thought. I’m a Metallica fan of course; for their three or four first albums, they have my eternal respect.

For quite some time now all your albums have followed some kind of template: they have this typical 40-minute LP length with your songs intercalated between Fenriz’s or vice-versa… You often hear that constraints or set patterns can actually be helpful creatively, that having certain things set gives you more freedom on others; do you feel this way?

Yeah, I think so. I think both Fenriz and I really agree on album length: around 40 minutes is probably the best. 28 minutes like Reign in Blood might be a bit too short for today, for instance. And anyway, we have so much music we want to release that it’s no problem for us to do 40 minutes-long albums. We could probably even do 120-minute-long albums, but I do really think that around 40 minutes is the perfect album length. At the moment, one of my favorite albums is the new The Cult, Under the Midnight Sun. They haven’t released anything for years and suddenly they come up with that! It’s a perfect rock album: 35 minutes long, eight songs, and it’s all good. This is how it should be done. The people who say that rock is dead should listen to this one!

One of the threads running in your discography is a certain need to go against the grain, against what’s being done at the time, modernity in a way, and rockstardom, maybe even against yourselves. Do you see it like that?

Yeah. I think it’s nothing we do on purpose really, but just how we are and have always been. Being in Darkthrone is not easy; it’s hard, it’s always been quite hard, but I think we like that kind of fight. And here we are now, with hearing problems and whatnot. But this is the path we’ve chosen, and it couldn’t be any other way. It was meant to be like this. I remember starting to play with Fenriz back in early ‘88… It was this immense focus. There’s no doubt that Fenriz is a natural drummer, he was already really good back in the demo days, and to have a good drummer when you’re so young really lifts up the other people in the band. When you have a shitty drummer, there’s nothing you can do [chuckles]. So that’s very fortunate. He doesn’t ever practice the drums, he hasn’t for probably thirty years. He only plays when we’re in the studio. He’s a natural: for him, it’s no problem. But as a guitarist, I have to be at my best when I get into the studio because there’s a lot of work to be done, a lot of things to learn… For Astral Fortress, we added different things along the way, so I had to be focused all the time. After we were done recording, I was so tired that when I got home, I slept for a week. But that’s fun! And we’ll start the fun again in April. We’ll see how it’s going to be then.

You’ve been playing together for thirty years…

Almost thirty-five, actually!

You started when you were in your late teens. What would your eighteen-year-old self feel about where you’re at, now? Did you have any idea at the time that you were in for decades, for something like what Darkthrone became?

No, we had absolutely no idea. I was sixteen when I joined Darkthrone, and I think none of us had any idea… We were somewhat awkward guys: all we cared about was rehearsals, playing together, and making music together. Around the time of Soulside Journey and Goatlord, we were basically living at the rehearsal place, it was our main focus. People were like, “Come to this party!” And we always answered, “No, we have to practice.” We laid out a huge amount of work in the early days. I think that’s one of the things that really cemented Fenriz and me together: now, when we’re in the studio, we understand each other’s way of thinking about music very well, we never really run into any major problems in that department.

You asked me earlier if we ever comment on each other’s songs: we do sometimes. If I think I may be out of line with some part, I always ask Fenriz if he’s good with it, and vice-versa: he tells me, “Do you think I went too far with this riff?” And I answer, “No, it’s okay.” It’s basically a matter of being yourself. For instance, Fenriz made a short teaser for the new album. It’s a funny video, and he told me afterward, “I’m sorry if I went too far with that.” I told him, “I liked it, and please, be yourself because I would hate to see us restrain ourselves. We can’t be chained down anymore. Be yourself, and it will be okay. The rest doesn’t matter.”

On top of Darkthrone’s twenty albums, you worked on plenty of other things: with Sarke, for instance, which released an album, Allsighr, in 2021. I guess it’s a completely different experience?

I like being in Sarke because it’s so different from Darkthrone. I talk a lot with Thomas [“Sarke” Berglie] and in this band, I’m just a vocalist. The songs and the albums suit me very well. For the first album, I remember going to Oslo, my hometown, without any idea of what I was going to do in the studio. I hadn’t heard anything. But as soon as I did, I thought, “Okay, this I can do.” It suited my voice quite well, so it was a good thing. I talked to Thomas just a few days ago: we are thinking about the next Sarke, and I think it will probably happen next year. I don’t know when it’ll be released, but I think we’ll record it next year.

So you will be busy with both Darkthrone and Sarke in 2023!

Yeah [chuckles], it’s usually like that. But it’s okay, this is what I do, I know how to do it. It’s easy—not exactly easy, but I know what I’m getting into, and I like it. This has been my life for thirty-five years now, but it’s always interesting and a bit frightening to go into the studio, especially with Darkthrone. There’s a lot happening by coincidence with this band, and you never know what’s around the corner. But that’s part of the fun of being in Darkthrone.

Thanks to Ted for his patience and availability, and to Valérie for setting this up.
All Darkthrone releases are on Peaceville’s Bandcamp. For news about the band, check here and there.