IMMORTAL INTERVIEW
(exclusive)
“You want to do a better album than the one before, but it’s not a competition with the last album. In a way, it is a continuation of getting the band on the right track, because there was a lot of compromising before, and Immortal’s music suffered from that.”
Immortal have long sat among the very most successful groups from the black metal scene, and if one discounts the more genre-blurring likes of Behemoth and Dimmu Borgir – and you should, because they are clearly doing their own thing – then they are almost certainly the most popular band still playing the style. Yet while few would argue with their iconic status, long-time black metal fans might be forgiven for questioning their relevance in 2023. And that would be a mistake.
Most will be aware that recent years haven’t been particularly straightforward for the band – and by ‘recent’, we’re talking about 25, which unless you’re an oak tree, or Keith Richards, is a pretty substantial amount of time. It was 1997 when guitarist Demonaz became a non-performing member of the band – severe tendinitis and problems with his arm forcing him to give up guitar and focus on songwriting – and 2002 when Immortal split up.
They would reform of course, but the sole resulting album, 2009’s All Shall Fall, was the last to feature co-founder Abbath, and a well-reported 2014 legal tussle over the band’s name was the unfortunate conclusion to the partnership. The frontman ultimately departed for a solo career, leaving his old partner-in-crime Demonaz, as well as long-time drummer Horgh, part of the band since 1996. Four years later, in 2018, the two would issue the storming Northern Chaos Gods album.
Another half-decade has passed, and Horgh has also departed Immortal, leaving Demonaz to stand alone, following another unfortunate dispute over legal rights. Not that this seems to have hampered his creative process, and the new and aptly-titled record War Against All is arguably even more fearsome than its predecessor. Eight songs of fast, furious and uncompromising black metal await your listening pleasure – reasonably accessible yes, but a far cry from the more overtly thrash and heavy metal-coloured efforts that preceded the line-up turbulence. In fact, the frantic songwriting and performance on the new opus exude the sort of hunger and fire one would usually only expect from a much younger band.
“I’m really happy to hear that,” begins Demonaz. “I always feel like our best album is not done yet, and you always want to push it a bit. Every time you want to do a better album than the one before. It’s always the plan to kick everybody’s ass, that’s every musician’s aim when they make an album, but it’s not a competition with the last album, in a way it is a continuation of getting the band on the right track for me. It was harder after All Shall Fall in a way, because there was a lot of compromising and Immortal’s music suffered from that. It’s got to be uncompromising in a way – the music has to be insisting and determined – in order to work properly.”
Demonaz has now surely put to rest any doubts regarding the legitimacy of a post-Abbath Immortal – not entirely unreasonable doubts, given that he hadn’t played guitar in the band since 1997 (a 2012 operation allowed him to play once more) and that his vocals were only really familiar to listeners of his underrated 2011 solo album. Most fans seem to have now understood that the parting of ways was at least partly the result of Abbath and Demonaz’s differing musical approaches, the former’s successful solo albums demonstrating a sound more in the hard rock/heavy metal leanings of his later Immortal compositions. War Against All does feature some of those larger-than-life, epic numbers that one might associate with those later Immortal years, such as ‘Return to Cold’, alongside slower, swaggering numbers such as ‘Wargod’, but much of the album is characterised by high-paced and hellish assaults, driven by pummelling percussion and featuring Demonaz’s rasping narration, the songwriting recalling the bands mid-90s glory days.
“I think with these two albums it’s easier for listeners or fans to see which way things are going,” Demonaz considers. “I don’t want to destroy the band or make more modern music. I was always so disappointed when bands were changing, when I listened to bands like Slayer or Metallica, and they became very commercial, it was always a downer. For me, the worst thing that could happen is if something like that could happen to Immortal. I feel in control now.” He laughs, before ultimately elaborating. “All Shall Fall is not the right direction. It’s an album that I like, there are not bad songs on it, but it didn’t come out the way I wished it to. It was heading somewhere away from [2002’s] Sons of Northern Darkness. I wanted it more like Northern Chaos Gods, more primitive, more direct, more insisting in a way.”
With this in mind, a conscious effort has been made to recapture the feeling of the band’s earliest albums. Though there is no denying that the new opus is definitely catchier, clearer and more dynamic than the likes of Pure Holocaust, its songs are unapologetically aggressive, heavy and black metal, the guitarist addressing this very point in a recent press statement, which read:
“I still write all the guitar riffs/music at home with the same old vibe, and the lyrics as well. The early days of black metal inspire me the most. Cold nights in the woods, on the mountains under the winter moon. That’s what keeps the spirit alive, and the foundation to all our music.”
“Maybe it’s also because of what happened with my guitar playing and my arm,” he considers, “but for me, the signature of Immortal at the start, that is the essence to me and will always be, which is also why I live in the past when I write music. When I wrote War Against All I was refreshing myself by playing [1995’s] Battles in the North – that was a great time, me and Abbath had so many ideas. The first two albums were more primitive, and Battles in the North was in a way primitive in its songwriting, but it opened up some opportunities. Going back to that time, it’s very inspiring. Writing an album today, it’s much more difficult because I don’t know where I should draw the musical inspiration from in the same way, I need to go back. When I did the War Against All album, I also listened a lot to To Mega Therion by Celtic Frost, because a lot of those songs are very heavy in the beginning and have a driving force which ends up in a very metal and violent conclusion.”
“Those three first albums are like the foundation of Immortal in a way,” he continues. “It was an exciting time, it was a very free time to create, and you established something that was your own take and nobody else had done. It was the beginning of defining a musical style or signature, so of course that is very inspiring to go back to. All the other albums mean a lot to me but on those three albums anything could happen in a way. Me and Abbath never argued at that time about anything, it was like a two-headed monster.”
Listening to the new songs, it’s easy to wonder how Demonaz was able to summon such fire and drive, particularly after so many albums and so many years on the planet and in the music scene. Not so much because of the physical effects of age, but because it’s hard to recreate the exuberance and excitement of creating your first recordings, something that is often clear when listening to later works by extreme metal bands, and indeed, bands in general.
“When you were younger and wilder and more vital maybe, that energy would reflect on the album,” he admits. “But with more experience, you know what sort of riffs and moods are going to take you there. You know, for example, how the riffs are going to sound in the studio, because when you were younger you didn’t know what didn’t work. Now I know more what the final product will sound like, so I don’t have to wonder if it’s going to sound great, you know what works in a way, that experience helps a lot to know where things are going.”
Another question that must be addressed is how Demonaz felt about essentially creating an Immortal album alone this time, now that Horgh has left the fold. It was surely no small task given that he was handling vocals, guitars, lyrics and songwriting, with only the assistance of a session rhythm section – Enslaved’s Ice Dale on bass and Kevin Kvåle of Gaahls Wyrd on drums. One would suspect it was a much harder proposition – wrongly, as it turns out.
“No not really,” comes the surprising reply. “The last album I also wrote 99 percent on my own and we just arranged it in the rehearsal space. We never rehearsed the songs, we just recorded, so it was more a recording album than a rehearsed album. It was much better this time as it felt more band-oriented. The music of Immortal, I make everything on guitar, I make the riffs and the main themes, tape it down, then I do some vocals in my home just to find the vibe of the songs and then I know immediately what sort of drums I want on it, whether its blasting or mid-tempo or slow. When we rehearse, the songs are normally almost finished, or at least all the main riffs are there. It’s not like making songs in the rehearsal space, it happens when I sit down and play guitar, that’s where the songs are created. With this album, I had a new drummer and when I listened to his drumming, I was very inspired because he has a very violent drumming style; it’s very tight but it also has personality in it. He was very excited to do it and I think that was helping a lot because he was very inspired and really put a lot of effort into the rehearsing before the recording.”
Demonaz’s deliberate return to earlier musical glories – both the band’s own and those of the groups that originally inspired them – has been accompanied by a return to the wilds of the Norwegian countryside, the musician leaving the (vaguely) urban confines of Bergen, in part to keep those original inspirations alive.
“It was a long-time dream to move out from the city again, so I moved three hours from Bergen next to the mountain and the glacier, out in the wild nature. It’s still the biggest inspiration. In summer I don’t write music, I take two months off and try not to write any music – and not because it would be reflecting summer in the music,” he laughs, “it’s just a way to keep motivation and inspiration. If I listen to Celtic Frost To Mega Therion or Slayer’s Reign in Blood, albums that mean a lot to me, I don’t listen to it [on headphones] with lots of people around, I listen somewhere where I have time to listen from the first song to the last. And I think that keeps the magic in a way, it’s a sacred thing – for some people that might sound crazy but if you want to survive and make music and be happy with what you’re doing, that is the core thing, to find ways to get inspired.”
Fans are of course wondering whether we will ever see Immortal finally play live again. After all, much of the group’s early reputation was built on their explosive tours and the fact that the band hasn’t taken the stage since the festival season of 2013 seems criminal.
“We will have a meeting with the management and see what options there are,” Demonaz says carefully. “I really want to do something, but I don’t want to do some long tour for the money, I want to do something that will do justice to the music, maybe play a one-off gig at a bigger festival. If I could choose, I’d play a concert on top of the mountains here, but it’s not so easy to do…” He laughs. “Imagine that, playing at the top of the mountains in Norway. Sometimes I miss playing live but it’s not about doing it just to do it, you want to do it in a great way, present your music in a good way. Maybe I’m too inspired by Quorthon in that…”
What the future holds for Immortal is not entirely clear in terms of personnel, possible reunions and live appearances, but it seems certain that anything created under that moniker will now have to stay true to this very particular vision. In fact, if anything all the conflict only seems to have strengthened Demonaz’s stubborn resolve.
“Maybe it gave me extra fuel to prove to everybody what it’s all about,” he concludes. “I think it was always like that, we always wanted to prove it was the real shit from the get-go. When we made the first album it was not popular music to play, you didn’t get any recognition at all, everybody was like, ‘What the fuck are you doing?’ People were saying, ‘You will never live from this, you will never get anywhere’, all the people in the press would just say it was nothing until we came out on stage and blew everyone away, or came out with an album that got big recognition abroad like when we released Battles in the North and suddenly we were in every record store, which was big for a band in Norway at the time.”
“We were in international magazines like Rock Hard or Metal Hammer, then everyone was like, ‘Oh yeah, we always believed in you’. They didn’t. We always tried to prove ourselves and get to the next stage, and it’s the same now. If you didn’t have anything to prove you wouldn’t do this. You can’t have a band releasing 10 albums over 30 years if you didn’t believe in the music or do this every day. Whether I like it or not, the band is the first thing I think about every day. You wake up and you see the mountains or whatever and you are aware, yeah, this is what you do, while everybody else is going off to work. It’s a lifestyle whether you want it or not.”
(This is part of a much longer interview that will later be in print)