With ‘E’, during the touring for that album, you slowly noticed that you were accepted by a broader audience outside the extreme metal scene. How did it feel for you?
Yes it has been really exciting to see, coming from the extreme metal scene which has grown a lot since we started. Since 2010 and onwards I would say, but especially the last few years, a broader audience has been paying attention to Enslaved. It is pretty exciting and it is always fun to present the music to someone new, which is important. The most important reason why I think it is rewarding, is I think that we have done this all on our own terms. The only reason for changing or evolving the band, has been because of our own musical interest. We did not adapted the band to become popular so to speak. But seeing that people are accepting us on our own terms is very cool I have to say.

That’s true, because it went slowly and smoothly into another direction. Not even direction, let’s better speak of additions…
Yes, we like that. This is our tempo, a mammoth climbing up a hillside (chuckles). It takes a while, but we get there.

At the end of 2018 you started writing this new album ‘Utgard’. What kind of mood were you in? What did you feel at that moment?
I felt at that moment very inspired, I have to say. We had a bit trouble previous to that. We changed a bit in the line-up, with Herbrand Larsen exiting the band and Håkon Vinje joining the band and then again on a Russian tour that we did at the end of 2017, the drummer announced that he was going to leave the band in the Summer. The next Summer. So we did have some time to prepare for that. Also we had talked to Iver (Sandøy – new drummer) who had been our co-producer for some years and a very important figure in the Enslaved history. He had already been playing some shows with us, when Cato (Baekkevold – previous drummer) had to go on one of his fishing expeditions and when he accepted to become part of the band, for me it felt like we were really given a new fantastic chance. Okay, it is always a problem when such an important member leaves the band, but now we have the chance to get another new start. So I felt really inspired, I have to say. It felt like one of the early albums, when you just want to be creative and sit with a guitar and work on the ideas. And that is how it  has been all the way through it and developed. It has been one of the most invigorating and sort of beautiful feelings that we have had, just perfect.

You hear that on the album. You have those mellow clean parts and then very brutal parts. There is a lot going on in this record…
The group effort is really a keyword and that is my personal theory why the album is as good as it is. It is five guys having a really good time playing together. It is simple and stupid, but I think this is the best recipe you can have. There was loads of inspiration between the guys and also we are very lucky to be who we are. Me and Grutle are kind of the old bulldozers of the band. We know how to play Enslaved stuff and that’s what we do. The three other guys – except from Grutle and me – are super skilled musicians. Like Ice Dale, he has a musical education, he can play any kind of music, like crazy Yngwie Malmsteen solo stuff, but he still has that furious thing. So you can hear it all the time, when someone steps forward, the other one gives him room and steps back. It is a very good dynamic.

One of the important features is also: if you listen to an Enslaved record, it is dense, but it doesn’t give you a feeling of being too multilayered or chock-full..  You feel that the music is still breathing when it comes to you…
That is great to hear. That was our intention. Is when you get to the end of the album you feel: okay, let me hear it again. It is also a funny little thing we discovered right before it was finished. When the album was finished, we heard that the beginning and the end part with the acoustic guitars fit together. The tempo and the melody. You can actually start the album again while listening to the last part of it. It is a sort of circle.

The heathen chants at the beginning are quite impressive too…
Oh thanks. It was the last thing that was made for the album. We were finishing up everything with extra additions and vocals at my place which is a tradition to do the last leads and effects and stuff, and suddenly Iver said: ‘The album should commence with singing. Just that, nothing else. Let’s do some chants to start with’, so we just had acoustic guitars and sang on it. That’s what we did in the middle of the night and the next morning we sent it to the mix.

That’s an exceptional occasion, but I remember you are used to do such special things, because I remember from our former chats that you went into the woods to record some organic sounds and now I found out there was an anvil involved, isn’t it?
Yes, crazy story. Me and Iver were working on the song in the studio and I said to Iver: we should have this effect with the sound of an anvil here. ‘Jettegryta’ is about those holes you can find in the ground in Scandinavia. Perfect circles in the rock. Sometimes ten metres down. Which is caused by the glaciers movements 15.000 years ago. Back in the Viking times, the people – they did not know so much about glaciers obviously – so they had these mythological explanations for everything. These holes in the ground were made by the giants. In Norse mythology these were the first creatures. Before humans came along, there were giants. So in mythology is said that the giants made these holes. Some thought they made the holes to preserve food, and some thought these were gateways to other dimensions and back to where they came from, which is Utgard. And I imagined these giants working, to build these tunnels and I wanted the sound of the anvil and then we presented this idea to Grutle. Still I thought it was a bit crazy, but he promptly said: ‘oh don’t worry, my neighbour where I live, he collects anvils.’ We thought this was just the craziest thing we ever heard. So we asked the guy: ‘Can we come over and try some of your anvils?’ He is a big Enslaved fan, so he collects everything of Enslaved… and anvils (chuckles). That was fun! A lot more fun than just a sample that you buy on internet.

In this respect you recently visited giant’s cauldron in Vardetangen, the most western point of Norway. Can you tell something about this experience?
Yes, that was fantastic. Now that we are in lockdown, we are limited. It is not so strict anymore, we can go where we want to, but in Norway. For some time we have been very busy with the album, without any time for something else. So me and family decided to take some time off and get away from Bergen. Instead of going to Sweden or England or something like that, like we usually do in the Summer, we decided to go somewhere close and we just went to this point northwest of Bergen. Small place and my wife is very good in doing research for interesting trips. She found this path that we could walk along the coastline. That leads to the most western point. Just beside this path, there was this giant ‘jettegryta’, so this has to mean something. I shared it also on the social media to show people. Pretty funny to see it in real life. What is on the album, appearing in the real world also.

And in nature you can always discover new things…
Exactly! There is so much more going on there than you can imagine, but I think this is a moment in the world today, when more and more people – young and old – start to realize this and start to cherish this fascination with nature and our heritage.

Isn’t that a trend in Norway, because you have much more possibilities to withdraw yourself from a kind of city life?
Yes, that is true. We are very lucky and privileged to have that opportunity. We have like one big city, which is Oslo. Bergen is a city, but it is just a big village. If you see all those places in Europe, Asia, and the US, of course it is very hard for people. Just to go there you have to travel long distances, just to find a piece of forest to walk in . So yes, we are definitely humble to have this opportunity.

For the video clip of ‘Jettygryta’ you went to Iceland. Please tell me everything about that?
We were talking about the video for ‘Jettegryta’ and – as I said – it was a phenomenon from the folklore. If you read about Norse mythology and Utgard, how it is described with those giant holes to another world, it is pretty much how Iceland looks. The windy, flat wastelands with these rocks along the plates… A really hard, rough landscape. Also raw and untouched. You can drive and drive for hours without seeing anything. No people. If there is few people in Norway, even less in Iceland. So we said: let’s go and try to make a video, a movie, that looks like the concept. Nature is all we need. Perfect!