Decayed - Nokthurnaal (2001)

   Usually when new music styles and directions starting to get widely known and popular enough to break into the mainstream, the additional styles are exhausted or dead already, and the last endeavours are made trying to create something new by mixing them with other genres. In that state was black metal from the late '90s and early '00s. But compared to other styles, this progress was slower and all states longer lasting, probably because of it's minimal effort based and poor quality production black metal didn't gain much popularity in the United States, therefore it was avoided by the profit hungry American music business dump. But in Europe things have been different, and by the appearance of symphonic black metal and other listener friendlier melodic directions, a new, musically declining period have been started. 

   As usual, the current tendencies forced some bands to switch style, others were gone, and some older names seemed completely unaffected. Decayed was this last category, they just kept playing their strongly Bathory influenced compromise-less music led by the same highly productive attitude they've started to play about a decade ago. Decayed became one of the most stable bastions of the genre, by always returning with high quality records. From the late '90s these became quite scarce in genre, especially in it's old school form, and ironically none of them came from Norwegian bands. "Nokthurnaal" had plenty of cover songs as bonus tracks which are giving a hint about the most determining influences of the band, with such honesty that's quite rare to find among black metal bands. On the side of evident classics like Bathory, Venom or Celtic Frost, some quite surprising covers cold be heard.