Hello guys, I hope you are doing fine! Congratulations with the new album with its special approach! How are you doing?
V: Thank you, all good here.

In 2021 previous album ‘WoduridaR’ came out. Were you satisfied with the reception and could you play some gigs when the world was open again after the pandemic?
V: The feedback was rather good from both the press and the audience. Naturally there weren’t many concerts during that period, but that was ok by us as we’re not a touring band anyway. Of course we could have hoped for more festivals, but then again…whatever.

When and how did you decide to split the writing process of this 12th studio album into two independent parts on the record and what did you see as consequences?
V: Well, we had two titles for the album from the get-go, so after a while we started playing with the idea of doing the vocals solely on the parts we represented. When this was decided the idea of doing a split came naturally.

How did you both approach this and how did you feel when starting to work that way?
V: It was basically me and H’grimnir who discussed this, and we agree on mostly everything we talk about when it comes to Helheim. But nothing was changed concerning the dynamics within the band as business went on as usual. The only difference was that you felt more in control over your own vocal duties as we’re used to share them more or less 50/50 on each song.

Can you go through your four personal songs and tell a bit more about each song, what it presents from your own musical spectrum (for instance the harsh side or atmospheric or whatever)?
H: There was always a desire to focus more on the aggressive expression for this album. We had tried to experiment with a lot of different moods with clean vocals on the last albums, but with these songs it didn’t fit so well. Except for my first song, ‘Geist’. There I already had a clean vocal melody line that I had to bring to life. Even with these somewhat «nice» melody lines, ‘Geist’ still has this desired aggression, with few pauses and short breaks and comes across as an intense song. With the second song ‘Sorg er dødens spade’ the tempo slows down a bit and the soundscape is larger. The bass and drums have practically only one rhythm throughout the song, which makes it quite uniform in expression. The guitars play differently on all the riffs except one, where they come together. The whole structure is very deliberate and is inspired by the lyrics which deal with death and burial. ‘Livsblot’: The fastest and most pure, stylistically, song of my four. Here, black metal reigns supreme, plain and simple. My last one is the longest and most substantial of my four songs. My approach to ‘Mennesket er dyret i tale’ was Bathory and in this case the album ‘Hammerheart’. I realized early that the song went in a total different direction and it became more and more clear that the song is a continuous feature of Helheim’s previous works. The first part deals with the more narrative aspect, while halfway through the song changes character and opens up more. The riffs, vocals and rhythms support the more conclusive theme in the lyrics, before it all ends with death and corruption.

V: Ad vesa (to be) is of a conceptual nature. The four titles represent the four traits that a man possesses. Before Christianity there were no sole concept of a soul, so you had different aspects that a man owned. Through the four tracks I try to explore these different aspects and their difference in nature. It wasn’t an easy task, but I chose to focus them from a personal level, and how I can perceive them from an imaginative standpoint. If I succeeded is a different question, and something that I cannot answer. Though it’s from a personal viewpoint I still think that the listener can fathom the meaning behind it all. To some extent at least. Since the four traits are quite different yet dependent of each other, the music also had to show variety yet consistency to each other. Hopefully I managed to do so.

Same question for the lyrical content of each song. What were you inspired by in each song?
V: I guess I’ve answered that in the previous question, but as I write all the lyrics, I can speak a little bit about the lyrics on HrabnaR (ravens). Those are four individual lyrics with their own little story. ‘Geist’ is about the ghosts/spirits of this and the old world. How they can appear and react, and the many names we have for these spirits. ‘Sorg er dødens spade’ (Grief is the shovel of death) is a tune about eternal grief that can’t be repaired. What can be the outcome then? The shovel might lead the way. ‘Livsblot’ (Life offering) is a lyric that I had laying around for quite some time, and it’s about the pride in man and its self-awareness of who you are. ‘Mennesket er dyret i tale’ (Man is the beast of speech) is a weird one, but in few words it’s about the hubris of man and how we destroy ourselves as well everything around us.