SATYRICON's Upcoming Album Will Be 'Very Varied' With Some 'More Conventional' Elements

Jerry Kurunen of Rauta conducted an interview with drummer Kjetil-Vidar "Frost" Haraldstad of Norwegian black metallers SATYRICON at this year's Beyond The Gates festival in early August in Bergen, Norway. You can now watch the chat below.

Asked what fans can expect from SATYRICON's upcoming studio album, Frost said (as transcribed by BLABBERMOUTH.NET): "I think that whatever this new album is gonna be, because we don't know for sure yet, but it's gonna be a more conventional album in a way, but there's gonna be a lot about it that is not conventional. We are looking into some different ideas, but I cannot reveal too much about them. That wouldn't make sense at this point. But somehow, the journey that Satyr [SATYRICON frontman Sigurd Wongraven] was on when he worked on the [Edvard] Munch project will also have a pretty grave effect on what is happening with this new material. And I think that it will somehow reflect on how we think musically. But you might also say that we are a bit more back in a more conventional landscape, if that term makes sense in SATYRICON's world. And I think that the album will be very, very varied. But you can always expect the unexpected in this band, and that continues to be true now and definitely not less — perhaps even a little bit more after that Munch period."

Regarding when SATYRICON will release the new album and whether there will be any touring in support of it, Frost said: "We have made most of the material for the album, and we have been rehearsing it and going a little bit back and forth with that material now, doing some demos and stuff for a while. So we will take that to an end, record it, find out exactly what to make out of the release, because that's gonna be a thing that people will find out when it's done. And I expect that we will somehow tour with the album — perhaps not a conventional club tour. Could be something else. Could be something more like doing special shows with some elements that add something visually or musically or both. And we know that the band will at least be active as a live band also in the future. And we have some tours planned. If you had asked me one year ago, I would have said that this is probably not gonna happen again ever, but people that do follow us on the Internet probably know that we are gonna be touring in the spring again. And there is probably gonna be more of that as well. So what I can say now is that the new album and touring following that is gonna fill a lot of the next two or three years. I'm pretty sure."

In 2022, SATYRICON released a 56-minute composition titled "Satyricon & Munch" in a unique collaboration with the world-famous Munch museum in Oslo, Norway. The music, created by Satyr, was written in the shape of a so-called musical work and transcended any genre barriers.

SATYRICON's latest regular collection of original material, "Deep Calleth Upon Deep", was released in September 2017 via Napalm Records. The disc was recorded in Oslo, Norway and Vancouver, Canada, during early 2017 and mixed together with revered studio guru Mike Fraser (who previously worked on SATYRICON's 2006 album, "Now, Diabolical").

SATYRICON's first two albums, 1993's "Dark Medieval Times" and 1994's "The Shadowthrone", were released as remixed and remastered reissues with altered cover artworks, in May 2021 via Napalm Records.

In July 2022, Frost told Heavy New York about how he and his SATYRICON bandmates have progressed musical since the group's inception three decades ago: "The way I see it, SATYRICON is always going through a constant evolution. We have always emphasized the importance and the meaning of creativity and innovation and boldness and daring to try something new because we see black metal as a genre that was born through creativity. It was born through bands that dared to go where other bands hadn't been going before them. They took things further in many, many ways, made their music harder and rawer than anything that was really done before that, and they brought some darkness into this that you didn't really have before. There were some attempts perhaps, but before the very first black metal bands, you didn't really have it in that sense. And also many of these bands showed a great pioneering spirit and there was a lot of avant-garde work going on. And these elements were very, very important, and through SATYRICON we have always tried to cultivate these elements and really make it a part of our musical DNA to cultivate that creativity. And then that is your starting point. I think that the band will go through lots of changes, and sometimes the evolution will happen in a very, very significant way from album to album, other times perhaps at a slightly slower pace, but it will always be there."

He continued: "I think that a band like SATYRICON has always been really bound to seek new musical territory and to constantly renew ourselves, and it's also a natural part of our way of operating too, to seek new ways of working and to see whether we should try to bring in something that we have never had before and that we don't really even master, and see if it is a resource that we actually manage to bring into the band and make the whole thing grow."

Photo credit: Morten Andersen