I really expected to hate Thronehammer right out of the gate here. It's well known that I don't like albums that are excruciatingly fucking long, and Usurper of the Oaken Throne sits at an offensive 78 minutes long, with the first three songs alone taking up almost 50 of those minutes. It's also slow doom metal, which almost guarantees it'll be dull and repetitive the whole time and it'll make those 78 minutes feel like six hours. I groaned as I loaded this one up for the first time.
As you can probably expect, this absolutely shattered my expectations.
Thronehammer is an international project, with the instrumentalists based out of Germany and the vocalist out of the UK, and while it is indeed slow, repetitive doom metal, it's presented in such a punishing, crushing way that I just felt my spine snap under the pressure the first time I heard this. All three members are at the top of their games here, cranking out absolutely devastating riffs with powerful vocals carrying the listener through this gorgeous torture. It's just dirge after dirge after dirge with no end in sight, riffs will repeat a hundred times in a row but it still feels like an almost Monolithe style bludgeoning where the lengthy runtimes are still dozens of different ideas at once. It doesn't even feel really thin on riffs and ideas despite so few of them actually being on display. It's just hypnotic and devastating and I love it.
Against my usual instincts, I'd even say that the best songs are the longest ones. "Behind the Wall of Frost" and "Warhorn" take up nearly forty minutes on their own, but they're both the biggest and most oppressively destructive songs on display. The pace never picks up at any point throughout Usurper of the Oaken Throne, but it doesn't really need to. There are subtle synths in the background of the former track that help it sound even more massive than it already does, and the main riff repeats a trillion times but it's so simplistically cataclysmic that it never gets boring. The latter track is similar in that regard, though it more overtly shifts through different moods and themes, but the monolithic pace and pounding riffs never let up. This is metal that min/maxed for total demolition. It's all heaviness and no speed (apart from the mid-paced climax of "Warhorn"), and for this type of glacial oppression that's exactly what I want. It's not quite funeral doom, despite how much I'm playing up the overwhelming heaviness, but it's damn close to being equally as heavy as Tyranny.
That's really all there is to Thronehammer, just massive riffs with enough weight to shatter an elephant's spine delivered at a pace that would be torturous if the riffs themselves weren't so effective. Between this and Smoulder, I'd say doom is having an incredibly strong 2019. The only real flaw of the album is that it isn't as strong in the second half, but that's something that all lengthy albums face so I'm willing to consider that a me problem and figure I'd like it equally as much if the tracks were randomized.
RATING: 90%
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