Darkthrone's most vampiric record isn't a concept album about vampires. It has one song about them, tucked into an album that's mostly about winter, mountains and Satan, and that one song has done more for the sound of vampiric black metal than any full concept record has managed since.
The song is the title track. The album is Transilvanian Hunger, the third of what's usually called Darkthrone's Unholy Trinity, alongside A Blaze in the Northern Sky and Under a Funeral Moon — three records, made in barely two years, that took a Norwegian death metal band and remade it as one of black metal's defining names. It was recorded in November and December 1993 not in a studio but in the bedroom of drummer Fenriz, on a four-track machine the band nicknamed Necrohell. Guitarist Zephyrous had just left, so Fenriz played everything himself — guitar, bass, drums — while Nocturno Culto sang. The two of them would carry on as a permanent duo from here on.
The lyrics split down the middle: Fenriz wrote the first four songs, Varg Vikernes, credited under the pseudonym Greifi Grishnackh, wrote the rest. "Transilvanian Hunger" itself, track five, ends on a line that has circulated in black metal for three decades: "Hail to the true, intense vampires." Everything around it deals in Norwegian mythology and dark fantasy — castles, mountain ranges, cold — rather than bloodsuckers, which is part of why the line lands as hard as it does: a single flash of a theme the record never returns to.
Peaceville released the album on 17 February 1994, and pressed it deliberately raw: unmixed by any conventional standard, guitar tone reduced to a buzzing hum the band insisted on keeping exactly as recorded. Reviewers at the time were divided — Collector's Guide to Heavy Metal gave it a poor score — but that refusal to sound expensive is precisely what later vampiric bands took from it. Where a band like Cradle of Filth built its vampirism out of orchestration and theatre, the Transilvanian Hunger lineage runs the other way: cheap equipment, plain song structures, atmosphere built entirely out of the recording's limitations rather than in spite of them.
Darkthrone played their last show in April 1996 and have avoided the stage ever since, which has only sharpened the record's mystique — there is no live version of "Transilvanian Hunger" to compare against the tape hiss. Rolling Stone placed the album 85th on a 2017 list of the greatest metal records ever made, an odd kind of vindication for something engineered, on purpose, to sound like it wanted no part of anyone's respect. Peaceville's anniversary edition puts the original eight tracks back into circulation, four-track hiss intact — still the coldest single sentence vampiric black metal ever wrote for itself.
