5. Hate Them (2003)

From 1997 to 2002, Darkthrone were either on hiatus or operating at 50-percent efficiency, with Fenriz mostly sidelined by depression while Nocturno Culto carried the band through two albums: 1999’s Ravishing Grimness and 2001’s Plaguewielder. But entering the studio for what would become ’03’s Hate Them, the Darkthrone drummer was healthy and invigorated, with a new approach to songwriting. Fenriz contributed three complete songs to Hate Them; Culto was the primary writer for the remaining four tracks here. (Meanwhile, Red Harvest’s Lars Sørensen — aka LRZ — delivered a basically unnecessary electronic intro and outro, as he would do again on the band’s next album, Sardonic Wrath.) But the full-time return of Fenriz led to a revitalized Culto, too — Hate Them is a ferocious, focused album, the band’s best since 1995’s Panzerfaust.

Recorded and mixed in December 2002 at Norway’s Pan Lydstudio over the course of 26 surely manic hours, Hate Them found Darkthrone in a celebratory mood, musically speaking. Where the band’s immediately previous efforts had been somber and pained, and their early work terrifying and bleak, Hate Them just rocked the fuck out. That wasn’t entirely new territory for Darkthrone: Panzerfaust was a pretty boisterous set, and ’96’s Total Death at least made an attempt to connect the band with their trad-metal roots, but neither of those albums did so as efficiently, consistently, or energetically as Hate Them. In the album’s commentary, Fenriz notes that his drum sound on Hate Them is solely influenced by “C’Mon Let’s Go,” a song by all-female NWOBHM demigods Girlschool, included on their 1981 sophomore album, Hit & Run (sample lyric: “Let slow life pass us by/ Another mile another day/ Get some action in our lives/ We’re on our way/ Living for today”). It’s an indication of Hate Them’s wild energy: all huge power-chord riffs and pounding 4/4 rhythms played with full-throttle abandon.

Hate Them isn’t exactly a party album but it’s an absolute blast of old-school heavy metal, amplified and sped up to ruthless turn-of-the-millennium extremes. A song title like “Fucked Up And Ready To Die” could be read as an admission of defeat or despondency, especially after Fenriz’s battles with depression, but here, it sounds like a full-throated yawp to Valhalla. Following Hate Them, Darkthrone ventured much deeper into their punk and trad-metal roots — indeed, this was probably the band’s true moment of mid-career rebirth, the possibilities of which they are still exploring today — but they have yet to again capture the wild-eyed magic and organic insanity they achieved here. The album’s title is oddly empty and generic, although its nihilistic punk spirit reflects the music. In a 2003 interview with Maelstrom zine, however, Fenriz said that his titular hatred had a small group of specific targets. Very, very specific. And very, very … random:

Maelstrom: The new record is called Hate Them. Who’s them?

Fenriz: Oh, *them*? Yeah. Well, who do you hate?

Maelstrom: Not that many people, really.

Fenriz: You see? No one wants to come out. I have a list:

I hate the people that make the long-sleeve [T-shirts] that look like they were made by an 8-year-old designer. Like, the logo eight times down the sleeve. You know what I’m saying? Who the fuck…? How old are these people? It’s like what you did when you sat in school and just wrote “Kiss, Kiss, Kiss.”

I hate the people that designed the subways that we have in Oslo. They want people to sit and face each other. I wonder how that would be if it happened in New York?

Basically, what I can say is, everyone knows that I hate the driving factory in extreme metal.