Under a Funeral Moon

The previous album, A Blaze in the Northern Sky, is treated as the band's first black metal record. It still carried traces of the death metal they had come from. Fenriz, the drummer who also writes the music, has said the writing for this one started at the end of 1991 with the aim of making a pure black metal album. It was recorded in June 1992 at Creative Studios in Kolbotn. The band used the studio work itself to build a sound that is cold and grim. The songs are shorter and more focused than the ones before them, and a film of distortion lies over all of them. It has been pointed out that this is the first black metal record on which distortion defines the whole of the studio sound rather than only the guitars. It is the second of the three albums, with A Blaze in the Northern Sky and Transilvanian Hunger, that are called the band's unholy trinity. The sleeve photograph is of the singer, Nocturno Culto, who has described the writing and recording of this record as the foundation of everything Darkthrone did afterwards. It is also the last album with guitarist Zephyrous, Ivar Enger. The running order here is the original's as printed.