DARKTHRONE (Norway) - Eternal Hails.... LP (2021) 180gram Black Vinyl.  Their 19th full-length studio album released by Peaceville Records on June 25th, 2021. Eternal Hails can undoubtedly be described as Epic Black Heavy Metal perfection. 
DARKTHRONE have created a magnum opus, a monumental masterpiece of the Black Metal genre that will stand the test of time like their biggest 
classics. And it will do so not because of fast tremolo picking and 
shrieking, but because it is different, it is courageous and masterfully
 written. Every riff here has its own purpose and importance, every riff
 has its own unique place and if you removed even a single one, the 
whole structure would fall apart.  Darkthrone has spent their recent run of albums asserting, effectively, that being an echo is what Metal is destined to be, and Eternal Hails,
 instead of being the epitaph and eulogy it might seem at first glance, 
might be better taken as a declaration of fearlessness in the face of 
eternity.  
Darkthrone’s greatest strength transcends any specific aspect of their 
sound. Their music should stand on its own while also acting as a Heavy Metal encyclopedia, a portal to a world where bands like Metallica, 
Manilla Road and Bathory exist side by side in the same canon, free of 
any genre enmity or even convention. Darkthrone conjure a mythologized 
vision of Heavy Metal where these bands were each jointly integral to 
the sound and spirit of all things hard and True Metal. Eternal Hails……
 is yet another chapter of Darkthrone crafting a singular stylistic 
amalgam from their many disparate sources. 
They’re a band as likely to 
lift a Doom Metal riff from Candlemass as they are a Thrash Metal band 
like Metal Church. Darkthrone care less for convention than they do the 
specific angles and idiosyncrasies of Classic Heavy Metal, and on Eternal Hails…… they represent all the glory and strangeness of its most primordially slow, heavy bands. Peaceville – VILELP910