Enslaved has never been the band to stand still in their development, and with the newest album “Vertebrae” they have just released their best album to date. Plenty of reasons to discuss the outcome of the latest album with founding member Ivar Bjørnson.
Hey Ivar, this is Vincent on behalf of the Dutch webzine Quintessence! First off, congratulations with your remarkable new album! So the album is finally released, how are you guys feeling right now?
It’s amazing, this time was probably the most exciting. It’s really rewarding to have the album out, it was a challenging album to make and personally it was like a cataclysmic feeling to have it released. When I woke up on Tuesday I almost felt like a different person. Tonight we’re actually going to have a release party in celebration, where all the band members will be DJ.
Could you tell a bit about the process of creating a new Enslaved song, is that really standardized?
Yeah, over the years we’ve come up with a working model so to speak. In the first phase I am on my own, coming up with the guitar riffs and such that make up the carrying structures. I record these in a modest home studio, and after a while I categorize them, make sense of the ideas. These recordings sound like demos, rehearsals, and are handed out to the other members to give some feedback. After that the band members start to work on their own bits, with which we experiment and then rehearse. After that we head into the studio. We tried many things in the past like pre-production and recording on a computer. But the best thing really is five guys in a room with instruments and the volume turned up loud. Otherwise things can get too theoretical which leads to surprises, so it’s easy to get fooled.
In that perspective, are you also the sort of band that always has everybody in the studio for the recording?
No, we work in fractions. Enslaved is like an old village, you have the town council who takes care of the big issues, the rest is all divided into little bits. The drums are recorded by the drummer and me, the guitars by the guitarist and me, the vocals by the 2 vocalists and the keyboards and leads by the keyboard player and lead guitar player. So we really work in teams of two, everybody has their own specialties. But we’re always with at least two people.
I can imagine that that also helps to preserve the Enslaved sound, alone would maybe be too tempting to step out of the box, so to speak.
You’ve been handling the production of your albums for a while now. Do you consider it a must to be involved that closely and have you ever considered getting an external producer?
There’s a few times that we were close to trying that, but it always felt as if it wasn’t for the right reasons, we realized they weren’t the right people to do the job. Producers can be really punishing to a band. Working with Joe Baressi on this album was experimental, but it was very positive. We are now ready to start working with a producer, because the integrity of the Enslaved sound is now strong enough to be challenged. There is enough expertise for Extreme Metal now, but it used to be very superficial, with producers not dealing with the band but more with their own perception. But now the industry is such that there’s a genuine relationship with the band. Probably the next step will be a co-production, and if it works out we’ll have a producer to do the full production.
You already touched upon the subject: You worked on this album with Joe Baressi, who’s for instance mixed Tool in the past. So you could call that a big name for an Extreme Metal record. How do you think he has changed the outcome of the album?
He definitely did. The most significant thing was that the pre-production was a very classical mix, and he really forced us into going along. He has seen Enslaved live and knew our albums, and he really heard the instruments. So what he did was put one guitar on each side, like in the old days when you heard a guitar in each of the headphones. At first it was uncomfortable for us, because we were used to having a large amount of layers on our albums, kind of the Metal way of things. But he heard that the music of Enslaved was strong enough to have clear instruments in the mix. We started to believe in it after a few days, and I think you can really hear it when you’re in a live setting, or when you use good quality headphones or stereos. It’s really more the sound of old Metal and 70’s Rock.
Listening to ‘Vertebrae’ you could call it a typical Enslaved album, especially compared to the last few albums. I think the one difference is that you’ve never sounded this progressive, while the Black Metal parts seem more grim and perhaps a bit more prominent than on ‘Ruun’ and ‘Isa’. Was that the intention before you went into the studio?
I agree with that observation, I think it really stretches both ways. A good example is the song ‘New Dawn’. We really spend energy on trying to avoid too much analysis, and sitting and listening to it all really makes us enjoy the promotion part, discuss with people and analyze things afterwards. You have to really trust your instincts, and that’s what we did with ‘New Dawn’. One of the guys said that there’s an element that sounds like material from before ‘Eld’ and ‘Frost’, off the first demo ‘Yggdrasill’, the song ‘Heimdalle’ to be exact. It has the same harmony, or disharmony, as ‘New Dawn’. I think that process happened over the last few years. With the new line-up we have a new confidence which started by becoming a better live band, and we’ve become much more comfortable with our beginnings. Changing styles can challenge your confidence in the old days, with fans saying you change and want you to change back. Your own first albums sometimes are like an enemy to your development. Around ‘Below the Lights’ we found a new direction, and it really made us appreciate the old stuff. We’ve been around for almost 18 years, we’ve had our 15 year anniversary, so when we listen back it’s almost like listening to another band, and we’ve become fan of them.
A lot of bands that combine styles that are far apart sound incoherent, but a great strength of your new album is the fact that you managed to blend these 2 styles into one organic sound. Do you agree and has accomplishing this always been a goal?
I definitely agree. When we started experimenting by letting these influences in we had to be critical to a degree. There is a difference between to observe and to integrate. There are some bands that I won’t name that are so good technical, I mean they play Rush and Yes songs and are probably better guitar players than I’ll ever be, a prodigy band if you will. But to mix things is different than to re-create an observation, they do it without feeling and own musical personalities .
With ‘Monumension’ we went too fast, there was too much at one time. There are many things we did well, many things we almost did well and a few things we did too much. With ‘Below The Lights’ we took a step back, maintained our style and tried to do things more gradually. After ‘Isa’ we were proud, after ‘Ruun’ optimistic, and with ‘Vertebrae’ we’ve sort of arrived where ambitions meet abilities.
I can only but agree with that projection, I feel the same about each of the albums!
You already sort of answered my next question in this regards, stating that ‘Monumension’ may have been too much at one time. But have you ever felt restricted in the creative process, simply knowing you can’t change too many things at once?
‘Monumension’ is on the entirely other side of ‘Blodhemn’, but they both have their special value. With ‘Blodhemn’ we realized we would never be a Black Metal band, but we went very far into that direction, while for ‘Monumension’ we went too far the other way. We realized that our real sound should be balancing between those two albums.
Do you have any new tracks you are particularly proud of?
It’s changing every time. But I’m really proud of ‘Cloud’, the first track, since it has so many different styles in it. ‘Center’ also remains a strong song, it may be a bit anonymous at the beginning, but it’s like a plant that grows. It differs a bit from the main path of Enslaved, but I’m very proud we can do that.
You already indicated that you’ve become a better live band over the years. Do your new songs always have to be suitable for a live situation?
We don’t think about it too much, we want the tracks to work in the studio, but don’t think about if they work live. I really believe in Classic Rock bands that have a sound on and off stage. I think bands should be different live, or at least for us. Some bands do it differently, like Tool sounds live exactly the same as on CD. So how songs are going to sound live is never a restriction on what it sounds like in the studio.
What’s the story behind the album title?
Eh, to explain it you have to take the word and the metaphor it stands for as a conclusion. ‘Isa’ had a concept based on the rune Isa, ‘Ruun’ is almost like a movie, it’s the same story looked at from eight angles, the runes. It’s a big story, and you could almost write a book about those two albums. It was kind of the same this time, but we wanted eight short stories that could fit into that book, that aren’t interrelated. The inspiration of the album title is in individual liberation. It’s a reaction to a world where you have mental and philosophical flavoury, people belong to a religion, trend, music, culture. Being an individual nowadays almost seems worse than having the black death. People that think on their own are labeled as disturbed, unhealthy. I could go on about this for a long time…
I think it’s also what seems to set Metalheads apart, the drive to be an individual, though joined by a common musical interest.
Yeah, it’s about finding out for yourself. For this album we wanted to find a word that would describe this individualism. So, there was a guy who was fascinated by the fact that a mouse and a giraffe have the exact same amount of vertebrae, albeit on a different scale. The word in that concept just jumped up. And if you ask people, whether German, English, Japanese, African what the word vertebrae symbolizes, in the end they all come with something metaphysical, being an individual, standing up for yourself.
In November and December you’ll be embarking on a vast tour through Europe. You must be excited about that? Tell me about the tour, any special places you’re headed?
We’re really looking forward to the tour; we toured so much for ‘Ruun’ that we’ve become addicted to touring. We’ve been rehearsing the new songs for some time while waiting for the release and doing the promotion for the album, and we believe the new material is really going to hit people hard. This will be our longest tour ever, with 45 dates in 51 days. We’ll be heading out with two Norwegian bands, Stonegard, who have a couple of albums out, and a new band called Krakow, who play something like Stoner and 70’s Rock. It’s kind of a strange package, but for us that’s kind of natural. During the two tours for ‘Ruun’, every show got better, there were more people and they got more enthusiastic, so it’s good to go out on the road again!
I guess that’s all from me! I want to thank you for the time and interesting discussion, good luck with the promotional part of the album and the upcoming tour, I’ll make sure catch you somewhere along the road!
