Your debut album, "Soulside Journey", had a contemporary death sound. Whatever happened to the band to make you revert to original death metal?
Right before we started to record the "Soulside Journey" album, I was totally bored with the whole death metal thing. It had no ideals, it was just musicianship to me. I wanted more of a lifestyle and ideology behind the music. The thing about death metal is that most of the fans are about fourteen years of age. To them it's just fun, and I hate fun. We don't want to have fans who are this young. We want people that have been constantly listening to extreme music for six or seven years, people that understand what it's all about. If we had continued to play death metal, we would have found ourselves stuck in a totally trendy scene.
To me, a criticism of "A Blaze in the Northern Sky" is the fact that you didn't explore the possibility of a further development in black metal. This album could just as well have been released in 1984.
No, no, no. I have to explain a few things about black metal to you. It's very different from all other kinds of music. Here in Norway, there are almost no death metal bands, but a lot of extremely manic people who play black metal, period. For example, when I talk to you now, I'm not just talking on behalf of Darkthrone, but also on behalf of the black metal council... We have a circle here in Norway, under the leadership of Euronymous of Mayhem. What we do is we discuss the future of black metal. We are trying to tell everybody who wants to start a black metal band what they have to do in order not to destroy black metal. Black metal is tradition. It's never going to change. Like blues, for example... If you tried to change it, it wouldn't be black metal anymore. The same goes for the sound: Back in '84, the sound on the black metal albums was really ugly. If you look at a black metal band, they look ugly, and they have ugly minds. You know, we play real ugly music, so we have to have an ugly sound.
So is it your aim for black metal to become more popular again?
Three years ago black metal was absolutely dead, and that's how we want it, we want it to be dead. When Venom were big, people knew what black metal was, but now... there are some people who try to start a black metal fanzine, something which never happened before. But it should not happen, we are going to stop this. We are not on a mission to promote black metal. Nobody should go out and buy a black metal album to have fun or to think it's nice music. Our album is not an album that you listen to and say, "Oh, he's a good guitar player!" It's there to give you a dark and evil atmosphere, and that's all.
Is it true that you are never going to play live?
Absolutely. We're never going to play live. That's what I said before, we're not on a mission, so we are not willing to play live. We've been asked by lots of death metal bands to play with them on their tours, but that's something we won't do. We are strictly against any crossover between death and black metal. We don't want to go out and get these death metal kids interested in black metal.
What kind of future do you see for a band like Darkthrone?
Everybody in the band has a job, so we don't have to worry that much about the future. If this band was our only future, we'd have to prostitute ourselves musically, and that's exactly what we don't want to do. If this band goes to hell - which it probably will, because we're so fucking evil - we still have our jobs to live on. But it doesn't look like we are going to stop for a while yet. We're going to record our next album called "Under a Funeral Moon" by the end of May; and our third album (I regard "A Blaze..." as our debut) will be called "Transilvanian Hunger" and will follow within a year. They will all be in the same vein, but "A Blaze in the Northern Sky" was just a tiny little start. "Under a Funeral Moon" will be much harder, and "Transilvanian Hunger" will be the worst. The people who like that will be total perverts.
Sounds like hard times are ahead of us. I, for my part, shall join that obscure Norwegian death metal circle and will not ask anybody to like the album... But if there is anything left in today's music scene that's strange, obscure, and cult-worthy, then it must be the ominous activities of a band called Darkthrone.