How Øystein are you doing at the moment?
Yeah I am pretty fine. It has been a busy year I would say, but it is more kind of relaxed now due to New Year. But 2023 was really busy with an autumn tour and the new album and all that stuff. All in all life has been busy, but busy in a positive way.

Did you finally enjoy the touring, because I know that you are a quiet person living in nature. Touring is hectic, all kinds of things happen…
Yeah I liked it. It has never been my favourite spot so the speak. I do this because of the music and making music when great things happen, the creative process of it, but yes, I have learned to enjoy the touring and it is also something about the privilege of being able to do to this and travel around the world. So yes, it is good. It is something I learned to like quite much actually last ten years I guess. For me it is a very big contrast to my normal life, because I live on the countryside and I am usually in my studio alone and I don’t meet too much people except for my family of course. So when going on tour to South America and doing a concert in Chile for many thousands of people, it is like: ‘what?’ It is crazy (chuckles) but it is fun.

I can imagine, I even have that feeling when I go to a concert, so many people around me is strange…
Even on tour, when we have some days off, I just went to the park. I don’t remember what State it was, but just sitting on a bench and listen to the birds and watching the trees. Squirrels running up and down the trees. It is also a nice way of getting away from everything I would say. That is my way of recharging the batteries. I think when I am travelling a lot and touring, back and forth, it is even more lovely to get back home to my cave and my wife and my kids and just my garden. That’s how I like it, I like these contrasts in life.

Indeed, you don’t respect the contrasts, if you don’t feel them sometimes in real life…
Oh yeah that is true. That is such a profound existential thing. Even with music. At the end of the day, music is all about contrasts. It is about a ‘sound or no sound’ kind of thing. You have a soundwave kind of thing or you don’t have a soundwave in a sense. That is kind of the core of life I think. It doesn’t have to feel right in order to enjoy the song in a sense.

As usual you took a lot of time to think about these compositions and the way you wanted to compose this music. Can you tell something about that? What was your state of mind when starting this whole new project ‘Fall’?
To be honest, I am pretty old now, I am 48. This year I will turn 49 years old and I have done this my whole life. The older I get, the more integrated the whole thing of music is in my life. I don’t think too much about it, I just do it, because I have always done it: with up and downs write some riffs or lyrics or whatever. It is more a lifestyle, rather than a state of mind. But of course, after the last European tour, the one with Moonspell and Insomnium, we kind of agreed with all the guys in the band: ‘okay, now it is time to start working on a new album’, because it is a lot of work with writing, recording, the cover art. You have to start at some point, but you know I always write music, I always think, breathe music. It is not that I need to go in a state of mind, but at a certain point you have to decide, okay let’s give it a go. Let us consider all these ideas and decide which songs we are going to use and I think we started after the European tour with Moonspell and Insomnium. When it comes to the themes for this album, it is nothing really new lyrically speaking. It is always about nature and this basic idea about man versus nature and all that stuff, but on this album I kind of wanted to focus on everything in this life whish is astray or far away, these things that live in the outskirts of our own existence. I mean, we live in cities, in towns, most of us live in a relatively safe environment, but all this civilization, all this comfort, all these havens around the world, is kind of secured by all these things and beings and places around us, the forefront of our existence in a sense. It might be the polar bear that walks around on the Northpole looking around for a seal to eat. The things that are animals or beings that we don’t normally see, we don’t care about, but they are very important for our own existence. I don’t want to go Greenpeace on mathematics, but we all know that when the Northpole and the Southpole melt, most of Europe will be under water. We can’t live anymore at a lot of places in Europe then. That is the basic idea behind this album: all these beings, animals, bacteria; freeze, whatever. They kind of protect us from the big ‘fall’. We have to stand up against the big fall, because we all know that as soon as we are born in this world, nature will do everything to put us back down in the ground and kill us. Sickness or bacteria or dangerous places or avalanches… the world is basically a very dangerous place! Even though in modern society we help ourselves with all the stuff that made us successful in this life on this planet, but it depends very much on the outskirts of life in my opinion. If there is a bacteria with mutation, look at the pandemic not long ago. These things can fundamentally change our lives. We are kind of lucky to have all those things guarding us in offence and that is the thematic of this album.

I remember as well that when the permafrost melts, lots of new bacteria and viruses will be coming out of that… we are victims because they are so old and we have never been in contact with those entities…
Yep. I think loneliness has its notion. We are quite social pieces. Most of us tend to gather together in society towns, cities, in order to be safe like in the old days. It is a way to feel safe. They depend on others; but I think in the outskirts of life on the so far Northpole, the areas where we don’t normally walk as human beings, that is where the real battle happens for our existence in a sense. The first song on the album ‘Summits’ is about everybody – or most of us at least – trying to find our best position in the world or in their own life. Whether you want to be a musician, whether you want whatever in this world, you try to be the best or try to get in the best position of you. That is also a struggle in a way. It is a little bit philosophical. We have this struggle with the outside on the outskirts of the existence, but also this struggle on the inside, the fight you have to endure to reach your own summit, your own peak in life. I think this is quite a fascinating thing.

Some of the lyrics are mind-blowing. They open a world we are not living in, but the celestial world let us say. ‘Nordic Anthem’ sounds quite ethnic… It sounds a bit different from the other songs…
Yeah that was a song written by Lars (Nedland – vocals, keyboards – Vera). It is kind of related to ‘Voices’, the last song on ‘True North’. We wanted to elaborate a little bit on that rhythmic, that tribal kind of vibe. With ‘Voices’ the volume was basically on one, but on thi ‘Nordic Anthem’ song, we wanted to integrate the power of nature, the power of the wildness of nature and we basically turned up the volume up to ten. So it is based on the same kind of principles as ‘Voices’, but we kind of maximized it. I wanted to make a full blown song of it. Powerful. Through the whole album, at least from my perspective, it was very important for me, because I think that was one of the musical success we had with ‘True North’. That is a brutal, atmospheric album. It is dark and it is bright. It is all that. It has all these typical elements that we use, but it is also a very serious and direct album. It has also a kind of uplifting feeling I would say. This uplifting feeling, this energy of life, that is something I also wanted to bring in on the new ‘Fall’ album, because that is the contrast towards the title of the album, because you know what is threatening all of us, everybody on this world, is the great fall. Whatever that is. I don’t mean in biblical sense, like everything is burning up or everything will happen in one day, but we are facing nowadays… we are all living in a world today that the great fall of this civilization, of this world, is very real. Wars, nuclear bombs, shit like that is going on or whether it is the climate crisis. I discuss a lot with my daughter. She is 21 years old now. What touches me really deeply, profoundly as a father, is that when I talk to her about the future, her generation has a different outlook on the future than I had when I was a kid or in my twenties. When I was in my twenties I had this notion that everything would go better one day, everything would improve. Everything, from the small things to the big things. The technology would be better in some years. The world will be a better place. There will be less war, the world will become better. That was my notion when I was 20 years old. When I talk to my daughter now who is 21, soon 22, she is saying: ‘we don’t expect improvement in this world anymore.’ They kind of expect that things will go wrong and that is dangerous. That is a real risk that things are not going well with this civilization in the future. That is a change between generations. So that inspired me also a little bit with this whole idea about fighting against this fall, whatever it is. For some people that might be cancer, for others that might be the crisis of the environment, but some of those things are way more real and closer. These things inspired me for the new album.

You are confronted with it by your daughter, by having the younger generation in the house of course… I have that feeling already a long time. My parents suffered in their youth with the wars and then they experienced an era of construction. Everything was getting better. They had more luxury than in their youth, but now it is going the other way around, getting backwards…
We are still kind of evolving. There are new smartphones, better than the previous ones. Those things still happen, but sometimes I kind of reflect the fact that the environmental crisis we are in nowadays, that is not something we can just find our way out of, because when I was young, there was always an idea that we are human species, we are clever, we can find a way, we can deal with it. In the 80’s and 90’s there was that ozone layer and we had to do certain things to fix that hole in the ozone layer. At some point we actually managed to deal with that somehow. It is not an issue anymore like it was back then. I think many people still think that we can go on with technology and produce robots to do the jobs. I don’t believe in that anymore, especially when it comes to the climate crisis. We cannot fool around anymore, there is no way around, there is no way back, we have to deal with it, whether that will be the great fall or whether we will find a solution or will be miraculously able to stop all pollution. Maybe at some point we will be able to do that, but it is very real now and I think that is something – at least not from my respective – but there is a huge switch between generations from me to my daughter. That is painful, because I would like her to have the same positive outlook on the future like I had when I was 20. But they don’t have that same positive idea of a good life that a lot of us had. And of course I also had my grandparents and my old people who were in the war. My grandfather got a letter from the king of Norway after the war and all that stuff. That generation had been through a lot as well, but since then there has basically just been things going better. Better technology, more money, everything has been positive in a sense. Not for everybody of course, but in general and especially here in the Western society. But now we have come to a point that we think: well, this might not go well.

Music should stand above the daily things in the world we are living in, otherwise it cannot be a kind of escape for the people…
Exactly. That is my goal in music. That is what music represents for me as a person as well. Music is my faith healer in life, mentally and otherwise. If I am sad I listen to music. If I am happy I listen to music. If I need some peace and quietness and being alone by myself, I enjoy listening to music. It is my way of recharging batteries, my way of just being me without restrictions. It is healing for people, also with travelling around with the band and this is also why I am getting more and more into the concept of doing live. In the early days I was more like: ‘no I don’t want to be an entertainer’. I think the idea of some people entertaining other people is a bit weird to me, but the more I have done this and the more I played the stuff live, I also see the value of this unifying force and that goes beyond. When travelling around, you meet so many people with all sorts of places, religion, culture, whatever backgrounds they have and it doesn’t really matter, because they are all humans in the same place, because they like some sort of music. To me that is such a beautiful thing. We were on tour in South America a couple of months ago and we did a couple of shows in Santiago. There was even an old lady, waiting for us. She came all the way from Uruguay and she gave presents to me and to my wife. They hugged me and told me how important the music has been for her and her life. Those things are real! It is so rewarding. Those things mean so much more to me. Of course it is great to get great reviews, thank you, but for me to be able to stand in front of a human being from a place I have never been, with a background I never seen or know about and just pouring out her emotions how important the music is for her, it is mind-blowing.