Darkthrone Blend Metal and Prog on “They Found One of My Graves,” Our Heavy Song of the Week

Heavy Song of the Week is a feature on Heavy Consequence breaking down the top metal, punk, and hard rock tracks you need to hear every Friday. This week, we highlight the new single “They Found One of My Graves” from Darkthrone.

There’s a beautiful mercurial nature to Darkthrone’s music. It’s not as easy as saying that they change consistently, because they don’t; they often have long stretches of iterating on the same ideas before suddenly shifting tack. But likewise, while there is certainly a strong throughline of heavy metal in all of their music, it isn’t as simple as reducing it to that either.

Take, for instance, “They Found One of My Graves,” opening track and lead single of their new album Pre-Historic Metal . The first four minutes or so are prime post- The Underground Resistance Darkthrone, taking heavy metal from that primal place in the late ’70s and early ’80s where doom metal, progressive music, heavy rock and early speed metal hadn’t broken apart yet. There are chord choices that modern doom would never make, a kind of heft that heavy rock maintains but much of heavy metal discards, a vocal roughness that sits somewhere between the punk-derived early extreme metal vocals, the barbaric hard rock of the mid-’70s and the manic voice of Arthur Brown from the ’60s.

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But then in the final minute, the whole thing bursts open with a lengthy proggy keyboard solo. Darkthrone have never been averse to progressive ideas sprinkled here and there, but this kind of outright prog is a rarity for the group. Yet it doesn’t feel out of place here or even beyond their voice. The primordial aspect, the deep love of rock and metal and punk in all of its stripes, is the ultimate unifying factor of their sound. And that deep perpetual love shows.

Honorable Mentions

A Forest of Stars – “Ascension of the Clowns”

Sometimes a song is great because of how it dials in tight to something catchy and compelling. Other times, like here, it is by showing the wide expanses of what’s possible within heavy music. A Forest of Stars may be progressive and avant-garde, sure, but that would imply it’s less feral than it is, raging like wild animals in a forest fire to convey something before burning up entirely. It’s high drama, not quite goth or black metal or prog or doom, gesturing somewhere else, beyond.

Khemmis – “Beneath the Scythe”

Sometimes, bands on the epic and progressive side of doom tightening up their songs results in them killing the magic. Not so with Khemmis; their secret sauce has always been incredible traditional heavy metal songwriting filled out with the elements of doom and progressive music that motivated so much of the early years of the genre before sub-genrefication took over. Upping the tempo to take what might have before been a 12 minute song down to six minutes still leaves us with shifting melodies, expanding and contracting songwriting and some of the very best singing currently going.

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Muse – “Cryogen”

Rock, it turns out, is very difficult to do well. The genre being as old as it is now is replete with cliches that invoke images of braindead fake angst and so many dead-end approaches that despite stable fanbases have little in the way of taste to justify them. Muse themselves have, depending on who you ask, wavered over that line themselves back and forth over the years. And yet they consistently find something worthy to say musically when it feels like they’ve been counted out by critics and fans. For a band once knocked as Radiohead knock-offs that overcame that designation, they sure do well proving themselves whenever asked.

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_Originally reported by [Consequence](https://consequence.net/2026/05/heavy-song-of-the-week-darkthrone-they-found-one-of-my-graves/)._