Enslaved Guitarist Discusses New Album ‘In Times’ + More

By Andrew Bansal

image

Norwegian progressive metal group Enslaved is constantly on an introspective mission to explore and expand their musicianship, and the latest result of their creative efforts is their thirteenth studio album ‘In Times’, slated for release via Nuclear Blast Records on March 10 2015. A follow-up to the magnificent 2012 release ‘RIITIIR’, the new album comprises six tracks of songwriting brilliance, giving extreme metal a new level of accessibility even to non-fans of the sub-genre, by intertwining its elements with soaring clean melodies. To present material from ‘In Times’ and from their back catalog on stage, Enslaved are about to embark on a North American headline tour with support acts Yob and Ecstatic Vision, and will play a record release show at the El Rey Theatre in Los Angeles on Friday March 6th (purchase tickets here). A few weeks ago, I spoke to guitarist and principal songwriter Ivar Bjørnson to discuss the album, among other things. Enjoy the conversation below.

Ivar, it’s good to have you again on Metal Assault. You’ve always said that you measure your own success by how you feel about your own work, and I think in that regard ‘RIITIIR’ was a big success for you. After that album and its whole touring cycle, what was your mindset going into creating this one?

If really felt like an inner pressure to get started on this one. ‘RIITIIR’, as you mentioned, was such an eventful release for us. It felt really good when it came out, there was a massive response to it, and we basically toured all over the world. Having completed that world tour cycle without much of a break, it just really felt overdue to start working on new music, and we did that the minute we got back from the last leg of that tour. Every available minute that we were not working on a different project or touring or playing festivals, we spent on writing this new one. A couple of weeks, may be months into 2014, it felt like such a movement in ideas and such a vast amount of inspiration coming down that we felt confident enough to book the studio for September of that year. It is a bit crazy booking the studio that early in the writing process, but it turned out to be right. The feeling we had was that of a band about to burst. I had to find the time to write the album a lot during nights and outside normal hours, just to get that feeling of isolation that is required to write material. So yeah, it was certainly the opposite of being a new band where you have all the time in the world but are lacking ideas, and now we have all the ideas in the world but finding it hard to get time to stretch them.

That’s well said. Obviously you have the extreme metal element in your music but also the more mellow segments. I think on recent albums you struck a good balance between the two, and it’s even better on this new one. Do you see that progression as well?

Yeah, and when you were talking about how we measure success, I think the key for things still being fun, exciting and pressurizing in a positive way for us is due to how we measure things, and another measurement that shows that the album is a good one for me is how this sort of bridging between the roots of the band and these other newer influences from prog and melodic stuff works, and how it doesn’t sound strained. It’s not like an arranged meeting between the two. It’s not like, let’s have a mellow riff and an aggressive riff contrasting each other. It’s like they have their own natural place and co-exist in parallel. The tension between the two creates a new energy feel, and it comes under the cliche of creating a whole product that’s larger than the sum of its parts, so to speak. I think that’s the sign of a step forward for us.

I think it’s important to maintain that balance and keep both elements intact. A lot of bands start out playing progressive extreme metal but may be in an attempt to become commercially more successful, they let go of the extreme metal part. I won’t take names, but there are bands like that and I’m glad you’re not one of them.

I don’t think that’s ever going to happen. It’s too embedded in our DNA, and even though we’re in constant progression, we’re at a point where our identity is already established. This is where we want to be, and we want to keep on exploring with that mindset.

image

Talking of the songs themselves, it sounds like you’ve given it your all in terms of creativity, but at least some of the tracks on ‘In Times’ would be a challenge to play live. Have you thought of that?

Yeah, becuase that’s exactly what we’re going to do. On this upcoming North American tour, we probably won’t do four new songs every night but throughout the tour four new songs will be included in the set. If it works out we would like to do four of them, but at least three every night. It will be a challenge, but we already know that they work because that’s how they all sort of came into being, because the minute the composition was done in my home studio and the demos were sent, that’s when we went to the rehearsal space and worked them out as real-life versions. They worked very well with just the plain instrumentation of guitars, bass and drums, so I can only imagine them working even better now that we have the vocals arranged, the keys and some more guitar versing and so on.

When it comes to bands with long catalogs, some songs are just never played because they don’t work out live. Enslaved doesn’t have any such songs, right?

We thought we had one. ‘Havenless’ has always been our Achilles heel. We hadn’t played that one live but there was such a demand for it that we actually played it last November and I think we’re going to keep doing that from time to time because it really worked out. So yeah, we don’t have any songs that we couldn’t do live.

Talking of this tour that you’re doing very soon in North America, it is with Yob, which is one band that does not know how to write short songs. When I ask Mike Scheidt about it, he says it’s because he just sucks at writing short songs.

(Laughs) They are worse than us. They have four songs on a full-length album. But it’s going to be a heavy tour. They’re one of our favorite bands, so when our management came up with that suggestion, we nodded as enthusiastically as we could, and tried to make sure that it would happen. We’ve been privileged to find ourselves in situations where we are touring with our favorite bands and seeing them every night. Yob is going to be, I think epic is an understatement.

But just to clarify, you’re going to be the headliners of this tour, right?

Yeah, and they are the special guests. More than anything, it’s just a natural musical thing based on the tempos of the two bands. It makes more sense, organically speaking, to end the show with the various ups and downs of Enslaved.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IwvcXnDl1GM

So, on this tour, other than the new songs what are you thinking of doing? You did a support tour with Amon Amarth a year ago and played a 45-minute set on that one, so a largely different set list would be expected from you this time.

Yeah, it’s going to be a longer set, so even though we’re cramming in the new songs, there will be plenty of songs from all the other albums. I think we’ve sort of left that ambition of including songs from every album because it would be so long that people would have to take an extra vacation to be able to see that show. So, what we’re doing now is starting with the new songs and we have songs from the early days including the mini-album that take us back to the basics, because it’s such an essential thing to have that, to explain to people where we musically came from. And then everything else that’s happening in between those is subject to the kind of atmosphere the new songs are creating. With this new album being more aggressive and to the point, that’s the kind of songs we’ll be looking for, going backwards in the catalog. Whereas if the new album was more of an introspective thing, I guess ‘Vertebrae’ and ‘Below The Lights’ would be the most natural albums to pick from. So, we’ll play songs from the newest and the oldest albums, and then whatever else that fits the menu.

Sounds good, as long as there’s still something from ‘RIITIIR’ in there.

Oh yeah, definitely!

Related – Gig Review: Enslaved, Yob & Ecstatic Vision Perform At El Rey

Enslaved links: website | facebook | twitter | instagram

North American tour dates:
3/05 – Brick By Brick – San Diego, CA
3/06 – El Rey Theatre – Los Angeles, CA
3/07 – Slim’s – San Francisco, CA
3/09 – Hawthorne Theater – Portland, OR
3/10 – Rickshaw Theatre – Vancouver B.C. – CANADA
3/11 – El Corazon – Seattle, WA
3/13 – Bar Deluxe – Salt Lake City, UT
3/14 – Summit Music Hall – Denver, CO
3/16 – Mill City Nights – Minneapolis, MN
3/17 – Thalia Hall – Chicago, IL
3/19 – Opera House – Toronto, ON – CANADA
3/20 – Les Foufounes Électriques – Montreal, QC – CANADA
3/21 – Gramercy Theatre – New York, NY
3/22 – Union Transfer – Philadelphia, PA
3/23 – Baltimore Soundstage – Baltimore, MD
3/24 – Sinclair – Boston, MA

Comments

comments