IT’S been eight years since Norwegian grand masters Dimmu Borgir have graced their fans with a new album. Following an ill-timed announcement by founding member Silenoz as long ago as 2020 that a new work was close to completion, and the departure in 2024 of long-serving guitarist Galder, Grand Serpent Rising finally saw the dark of night this month.
HOT METAL: It’s been a minute since the last Dimmu Borgir album. Is it going to be eight years between albums from now on?
SILENOZ: (laughs) It never helps when you have a fucking pandemic in the middle of it! I was a bit overly positive back in 2020, 2021 when I said – because we had three or four songs finished at the time – ‘Oh it’s gonna take that long this time!’ And it probably wouldn’t, if it wasn’t the fucking locking down everywhere. But here we are, finally. And it feels great to finally have it out.
HM: What story are you telling with this album?
S: I think musically speaking we are touching on all the eras of the band, in many ways. There’s a few nods to the early days, also you have the mid era with Spiritual Black Dimensions, some Puritanical stuff and Death Cult stuff, and then you have the later stuff. I feel that it’s an extraction of the best parts from all those albums compiled into a collection of new songs! That’s what a new album is, isn’t it? So we’ll see how it stands the test of time, but we all think like we’ve done our best.
HM: Well you’re obviously pleased with it and you must be excited that it’s finally out there. What has the reaction been like so far?
S: Well it’s been really positive actually. I’ve done a lot of press already and I think it’s fair to say that it’s been received pretty positively all over the place. Obviously since I went off social media six or seven years ago I’m not reading comments or anything, but people are sharing screenshots and it’s the usual polarisation. There’s people who love the new single, then you have people who hate it even before they’ve heard it. So it’s nothing new in that department. But it all feeds into the algorithm and gets our name out there, so I’m thankful for everything.
HM: I found it interesting that you’ve done some of the songs in Norwegian, which is something you’ve done over your career. What was the creative choice behind that decision this time?
S: I was working on a piece of lyrics and I felt like I was having trouble trying to convey what I was trying to convey, basically. So I was trying it in Norwegian instead and suddenly it just made sense. I had a lot of words to that lyric ready and I sent it to the other guys and asked if we should do another one in Norwegian, for once. They said that was cool, and that made me do another one. It’s nothing more dramatic than that. It was just a cool thing to do, and it made sense. I’ve always been a go-with-the-flow type of guy, and if I get stuck somewhere I try to find a solution to things and move on, and that was the solution.
HM: Have you ever had a conversation with Shagrath about doing another entire album in Norwegian? I don’t think anyone would begrudge you if you did that?
S: I think at this point in time, people would not be surprised by anything that we might do. It’s a great place to be after so many years. After so many decades, really. It’s a weird feeling, because I don’t look upon it as that long. I think if we think we have anything to prove, it’s to ourselves, not to anybody else. Obviously we take all the praise we get and all the thumbs-up and all the support, because that’s at the end of the day what pays for the salt and the butter on the table. We could have taken the easy way out and copied Enthrone Darkness Triumphant several times in this time period of eight years, and maybe the bank account may have looked better that way, I don’t know! But we wanted to take the time it takes to finish a new album. Art goes before everything, and we sacrifice everything we have to do it. And it’s not because we feel like we have to do it, then we would have done it every year, or every second year. We do it because we went to, for the love of the craft.
HM: It must be different having the freedom to do that now. When you were a young band, there must have been a drive there to get everything out as quickly as you could. You must feel more comfortable now that even though you’ve only done two albums in sixteen years, people aren’t going to forget your band exists.
S: That’s always a chance, in this current day. That might also indicate that we don’t do anything in terms of spontaneity, but that’s not the case. We’ve learned from the past and from experience to go a little bit more with the flow. Seeing where the songwriting takes us is more important than over-analysing too much. Every band does that. Over-analysing and never end up concluding things. The downside of not having a timeframe or a schedule on when to finish an album is that it can be tricky, but for us it has worked out for the better. And I think the label knows that if they give us the time we need, they’ll stand behind it as well. That’s worked for us. Maybe it would be a different story if we were a lesser-known band on the label.
HM: It’s definitely important that the label had such faith in Dimmu Borgir. You have the reputation and the fanbase to support that. I can imagine how frustrating it may be for your fans to have had to wait such a long time, but was it a frustrating period for you, too, to come out a few years ago and say that the record was nearly done when it was far from it. You didn’t have a timeframe. Was there ever a concern that the album was never going to be finished?
S: I was never really concerned about that. We had some meetings and we concluded that we had to have some kind of timeframe where we were going to record all this in a proper studio. That’s when we started discussing who to do that with. Fredrik (Nordström) came up pretty quickly because he had done a really good job on the remix of the Puritanical anniversary album. He’s been bugging us for the past 10 to 15 years – “Hey let my come back and do another fucking killer record!” We thought we should give that a try, because to gamble with a brand new producer/engineer wasn’t something that we wanted to do, so we decided to work with Fredrik again. I’m really glad we did now!
HM: Was it a blow when Galder decided he wasn’t going to be working with Dimmu Borgir anymore? Was it something you suspected? He was in the band for a very long time.
S: It was sudden in that one day he said he was going to quit Dimmu and concentrate on himself. Which is fair enough. I had been bugging him to do Old Man’s Child since 10 to 15 years ago, but he just didn’t seem interested. He wasn’t that involved in the song writing process for this album, so it didn’t come as a shock, really when he decided he wanted to concentrate on his old band after so many years. I think that was the healthier option for him. But at the end of the day, it doesn’t make that much difference because it’s been Shagrath and myself there at the helm, throwing in most of the ideas and we had a lot of stuff on the shelf that we had been concocting in the studio. There was never a shortage of material to choose from. The challenge was always what not to bring to the album. We all have so many pieces of music that we have been working on that didn’t make the album, which we didn’t want to force into a song just to make it a song. If we had done that it would have been a double album, but I think that 13 songs with Dimmu is enough for people to chew.
HM: There’s an hour of music there, so there is certainly plenty to chew on. What is the significance of the title?
S: The snake and the serpent have been a very misunderstood symbol, the way we see it, over so many thousands of years. In religious camps, it is looked upon as a fearful and negative symbol. It’s a symbol of regeneration, rejuvenation – renewal, basically. And also: wisdom. The snake has been seen for millennia as a symbol of wisdom. As it sheds its skin, it starts anew. That’s how we feel every time we do a new album. We’ve always used the serpent symbology over the years here and there. The alchemy part, alchemy is the art of manipulating life and consciousness into metal, and I think it’s fair to say that has a huge significance to this album as well. They all go really well together.
HM: It would be remiss of me to interview you and not ask about the possibility of Dimmu Borgir touring Australia again. It has been an extremely long time.
S: A long time! Yes. It’s on the books. We probably won’t come this year, but next year looks pretty open as far as Australia comes, so I hope we will have some dates to announce there in the near future. I hope so. We have a huge fanbase there, and each time we come there, it’s amazing. We can’t wait to come back.
HM: Do you still look back at Stormblåst and For All Tid occasionally? Because both of those records were seminal to the evolution of Norwegian metal and they came out at a time when there was a real spotlight on that. They’re still held up today, and I know you did the 20th anniversary edition of Stormblåst, but this year’s the 30th anniversary of that record now!
S: Yeah, that’s true! It came out in ‘96 I believe. We’ll see what we can do with that, too! That’s the thing about being so many years and decades in. There’s always a new anniversary around the corner. As for your question about the first album, we had to revisit it a little bit more because obviously we had the 30th anniversary in 2023 and we did a different set at the Beyond the Gates Festival in Bergen. You can tell that we are young and inexperienced about pretty much everything! But you can still hear the charm around it. You can hear the tiny little start of something big, I think, and we’re lucky enough to still be here after so many years, and this is what we were supposed to do. We had that conviction probably, and you don’t become aware of it until you get older and realise this is what you’re supposed to.