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Jul 11, 2019Even given all those evocations and tonal shifts, Old Star feels cohesive. That’s down to the assured musicianship and the precisely engineered sound the band has mastered.
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Jul 11, 2019Old Star sounds as new as it does born of another epoch, reminding us that though genres and scenes may change, the riff is eternal.
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Jul 11, 2019This new album is in line with what fans of the band’s more recent (as in, post-2006) material have come to expect, but with a new twist—namely, the outsized impact that traditional doom bands like Candlemass and Solitude Aeturnus seem to have had on the songwriting. Darkthrone still stand firmly in the heavy metal (with a dash of punk) camp, but they’ve definitely got a soft spot for old-school gloom.
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The WireJul 11, 2019The music on Old Star is not black metal, stylistically speaking, but it nonetheless telegraphs Darkthrone’s cackling, sardonic grimness so as to transpose a blackened atmosphere into speed metal riff salad, epic/trad doom and frequent moments that call up Celtic Frost’s hallowed splicing of iron and velvet. [Aug 2019, p.64]