Green Carnation – interview met Kjetil Nordhus (vocals)
Kjetil Nordhus: “We have not thought of it as the next ‘Light Of Day, Day Of Darkness’ necessarily when writing the music. We have written music that is natural for us to write in 2025.”
De kogel is door de kerk. Green Carnation heeft een ambitieuze trilogie aangekondigd en in september het eerste deel ‘A Dark Poem, Part I – The Shores Of Melancholia’ geopenbaard. De Noorse band brengt daarmee jaarlijstmateriaal uit dat stevig, maar sierlijk is, bij tijden rigoureus, maar anderzijds vol weemoed en elke muzikant speelt op het allerhoogste niveau. Om nog maar te zwijgen over de verrukkelijke vocale prestaties van Kjetil Nordhus met wie we zo lang mogelijk praatten vooraleer hij zich met de fiets doorheen Kristiansand moest bewegen voor zijn werk. Het werd een volgend heuglijk gesprek dat we ons altijd zullen herinneren. Net zoals hun muziek.
Vera Matthijssens Ι 13oktober 2025
How are you doing?
It has been a busy period, since the summer holidays at least. Everything with the launch of the album and rehearsing all the new songs and do the live show in the US last week.
Yes, I have seen that you played at ProgPower USA. What about this adventure?
Oh it was the third time we have been there. We know the festival quite well. We have played there in 2016 with the ‘Last Day Of Darkness’ comeback and then we played there in 2024. Normally they do not invite a band so quickly again, but we got the opportunity. We played all the new songs from ‘A Dark Poem part I’ two days before the release, so it was very exclusive. We thought it was a good idea, so we’d manage to do that. So that was really cool.
Indeed and you know the songs already enough to play them live. That must have been lots of rehearsing…
Yes it was very much rehearsals indeed. And we had some technical problems at the festival, so it was as if everything was a bit strange on stage for us this time. I did not have an idea how good it was, but the feedback from the crowd was amazing. We must have done something right. Then you know if you have rehearsed enough, when you know the songs so well that you can even play them in difficult circumstances.
For a long time there was a rumour going round that Green Carnation would make a kind of sequel to ‘Light Of Day, Day Of Darkness’, but it always remained hazy. Until now… so this is the moment to tell me: when did you finally started writing and when did it take shape?
Like you said, there has been talking about doing something after ‘Light Of Day, Day Of Darkness’, because after releasing that album, it was kind of hard to decide which was the next step for the band. We even considered a trilogy and by Tchort it was even named ‘The Rise And Fall Of Mankind’, but then, after writing ‘Light Of Day, Day Of Darkness’, I think that Tchort had emptied himself of a lot of creativity of course. Up until the band kind of quit, in 2006 or 2007, there had not been any progress in that idea. So when we came back in 2016 for the ‘Light Of Day, Day Of Darkness’ anniversary, we had not really decided whether to go on as a band. We just wanted to do those shows and see how it felt and of course that feedback during the entire 2016 was so overwhelming for us, from both my previous bands and the metal community as a whole. So that gave us the inspiration to decide to continue with Green Carnation and write new music as well. That was when the idea popped up again. But we knew that it was going to be a lot of work. When we talked to Season Of Mist, they came to the idea from the first meeting and we decided to go with them and give ourselves enough time to write all three albums. So therefore we decided to do one other album first, which was released in 2020 ‘Leaves Of Yesteryear’, as you remember. Also we re-released ‘The Acoustic Verses’, which was in 2022 I think (December 2021). To give us enough time for writing the stuff, but I would not say that what we made is the thing we thought about after ‘Light Of Day, Day Of Darkness’ but we took off the idea of doing a trilogy, because you know Green Carnation well and we want to challenge ourselves to challenge our fans and followers. We have not thought of it as the next ‘Light Of Day, Day Of Darkness’ necessarily when writing the music. We have written music that is natural for us to write in 2025, 24 years after ‘Light Of Day, Day Of Darkness’ of course, but also after having released lots of different kinds of albums in the early 2000’s and also of course ‘Leaves Of Yesteryear’ in 2020. I think it is more a progression of Green Carnation of 2025, more than a sequel to ‘Light Of Day, Day Of Darkness’ to be honest.
That is also natural, because you develop as a band and as a person and what comes out is somehow coming from deep within you…
Absolutely and also, all the new songs are written by myself and Stein Roger Sordal, the bass player, Tchort had not been writing and therefore I don’t think it would be right for us to just steal his kind of idea and then write a trilogy and call it what he wanted it to call it, when he is not composing music. So that might happen sometimes, who knows, but now it was right for us to write the music and we spent… we started writing the music in 2018. So we have been working on this big long term project since 2018. We even wrote another album in the meantime (chuckles). It was such a huge task, during covid-19 as well. Some people were super creative during covid-19 and some had a depression during covid-19. I wouldn’t say that we were super efficient during covid-19, but we used – tried to use – those quiet years to get a few steps further. I think the time between 2020 and 2024 was most of the music written, but there are themes and ideas for songs on demos already done around 2018. So it has been a long process.
When you want to create something from yourself and surely a trilogy, I think it is necessary to take the time…
Oh yes absolutely. For us, we wanted to be on the level that we wanted to be. I don’t think we could do it in much shorter time, because if we only had the trilogy, the three albums, to think about, we might have been able to release it a little bit sooner, because we would not have to release the album in 2020 then, but I think it was quite important for us, to tell the people around that are interested in Green Carnation, that we were still alive and writing new music and this big project coming soon. We have written and recorded everything, sent it to the studio last year – not every day from 9 to 5 – and we occupied it from April till December. So everything is already recorded. We have done that as well, because I think it would have been a bit of a challenge to start writing album 2 or album 3 now. The next two albums are going to be released next year. So it is going to be a very nice and hectic period for Green Carnation for a while. We are extremely proud of how the album turned out. We have tried to do our best, because as I said, we recorded all the songs, all the demos first. We had like maybe up to 20 à 25 different versions of each and every song. We wanted to have them as perfect as it could be, we didn’t kind of finish any songs before we were 100% happy with it and then after that we tried to compose the three different albums. When you listen to the first album, we want people to feel that it is an album that can stand on its own legs. It is not an open ending. It is not like ‘oh what’s going to happen in part 2’ like in movies or TV series. And we wanted to try to compose the second album in the same kind of way, so that it could be a separate album and then, I think it is going to be on the third album that everybody is going to realize or understand and say ‘okay, this is all connected’. I cannot say too much about it yet, but it is nice to build up a little bit excitement, until next year I guess.
That’s why I don’t ask about the lyrics and whole concept, but ‘Me My Enemy’ should be a very special lyric. Can you tell something about that?
Yes there is a lot of good feedback on that song and I think it is because we talk about stuff that people can relate to. I think we do that for all the albums and it is very clear. On ‘Me My Enemy’ it is easy to understand what it is about, right? I think that during your life and this has been written during our seven years lives, there are a lot of things that happen in your life. Of course you can have dark periods and you can have very different periods and I think for Stein, who has written the lyrics, for me also while performing, I can relate to these lyrics very much. I don’t need to explain them too much, as you said, but it seems to be something that many, many people can relate to and I think with many other songs, that we are dealing with stuff that most people – at least at our age – have felt, have experienced during their lives and – maybe not now but many some times during your life – but for me ‘Me My Enemy’ is a very personal one and we also have to deal with the bigger pictures, more like outside of your person, how things are in society. Everything is moving so fast, you feel you are losing control – at least I do – you don’t even know what is true anymore. And that is a very uncomfortable feeling for somebody who grew up with ‘okay, this is true, this is not’. I can relate to that, you know. Everything is happening so fast now, it is kind of… I think we are in a generation that feels we are losing control and that is an extremely uncomfortable feeling. Sometimes I just want to throw everything away and then move into the mountains and just stay there for the rest of my life and I really don’t want to bother with anything or what’s going on that I have no control over anyway.
I have the same feeling in life. Everything you are raised with disappears. In the past I really wanted to go out but in the end you turn a bit to yourself and just want to enjoy peace of mind…
It is true and that is one of the levels when it comes to the lyrics and the other level is of course the personal level, because then again, it is not that easy to cope with stuff inside yourself as well. In your situation and with family stuff. For example, both me and Stein, he lost both his mother and his father during the writing process and I lost my father during the writing process. That does something with how you see your role in your own life. Everything just changes and it is not always a comfortable feeling. That is also something you don’t have control over, your inner feelings, because there is stuff around you that can influence that very much. Like relationships and kids that go out into a world you cannot relate to anymore. It is all those feelings that we are dealing with we spread over three albums. I think we kind of needed three albums in order to try to empty ourselves from all the frustration and the alienation when living in the world today.
It is happening at many levels, because we have the hectic world in a flash and at home there is another situation you have to face…
Yeah with Stein, his wife has brain cancer. She had a half successful operation five or six years ago. So he doesn’t really know if he is going to have her for one more week or ten more years. It also does something with you as a person, always living in uncertainty every day. That can also make you kind of mad I think. Throughout the trilogy you find us dealing with those kinds of feelings as well and I think like ‘Me My Enemy’ is touching unto that a little bit as well.
Suddenly, in ‘The Slave That You Are’, there is a lot of aggression and you invited Enslaved front man Grutle Kjellson to do some growls. That sounds like an outburst of emotions…
Yeah that’s an outburst towards the way that society expect something from you and if you don’t do what the society tells you to do, you are going to be fucked basically (chuckles). The original idea for the song was… we had a guitar part, which is the beginning of the song, that song was first on a demo and there was an extra aggression in there and we wanted to see where the aggression would take the song and it ended up being the most aggressive song Green Carnation had ever done. Originally I did clean vocals on it, but then the stuff became more and more aggressive and then we thought we would keep the aggression through the verses. I tried to do some extreme vocals. I am not an expert in that, although I did some quite cool when I tried in the studio, but we have done no compromises on this album, so I did not want to do something half good. The guys in the band found the vocals really good, but I wanted somebody who does that kind of vocals to make a song even better and fulfil the tension in the song. I was thinking of Grutle and he accepted. It turned out exactly the way I wanted it to be, because I think his voice is perfect for that song.
Yes it is a nice different atmosphere…
Also, I want to say… I think many people will be shocked (chuckles) when they hear the song for the first time, but after you have listened through the song, I think most people would recognize this as a kind of typical Green Carnation song although it does sound a little bit different.
Another thing that leaps to the eye, is that Kenneth Silden, keyboard player, is still on the record, but now Endre Kirkesola has come back I think…
Kenneth quit in the beginning of the recording process. Some of the keyboards… I would say that the keyboards are played by Endre Kirkesola already in the studio. Endre is also our producer. He has been in the band before, many times before he played with us live and at ‘Light Of Day, Day Of Darkness’ he was already the producer. So he is here for this trilogy, we just had to ask it. Kenneth wanted to do something else, which is fair, we are still good friends with him, but it was a very natural choice for us to ask Endre because when we started working on the keyboards in the studio, together with him and he is the man who has many good ideas and actually it was like: ‘why don’t you just return in the band’ at least for a period we are doing ‘A Dark Poem’. Maybe until 2027 we are going to do some stuff with this. So he really wanted to do that. A very natural decision for Green Carnation and we are happy to have him back.
Indeed, because he was there with ‘Light Of Day, Day Of Darkness’ as well…
Yes he was and he also played with us live and also when we get back together in 2016, he was the live keyboard player, so he is not new to that at all.
Something that returns many times as well is that the cover art was done by Niklas Sundin…
We said to ourselves in the beginning of the process that we were not going to use people we have worked with before, just because we worked with them before, but we still ended up doing the trilogy in the DUB Studios with Endre Kirkesola and also Niklas as the cover artist. With Niklas it just felt very natural for us to talk to Niklas, because Niklas has been also in the Green Carnation universe for more than twenty years. We worked with him several times and you know the art concept of ‘A Dark Poem’ is also a big art project. You have three different art covers, you have the box set, you have like two singles for each album maybe and everything is going to fit together and be a part of a bigger idea, which is also going to suit with the bigger idea we have and the ambitions we have musically. There was not a doubt in my mind that Niklas – if he had the time – that we wanted him to do it, because he understands very quickly what we want. We don’t even have to talk too much about what we want, because when he hears the music and he reads the lyrics, he came up with some pencil sketches and it was kind of ‘okay’, he just kind of understood everything we wanted to say, not only with this first album, but with the entire album art project, so I think that was also good for us, that we could work with him and everything worked out for the first second, from his first ideas. It is like an extra medaille on the entire project that Niklas is involved.
Melancholy even pops up in the title. It has always been a very important feature of the band and wider seen it is an emotion everybody can relate to… does that feeling run throughout the whole concept?
Well, I am not going to reveal the next title, but melancholy is something that is very important for Green Carnation. It is always there when we make the music for some reason. All around in our stuff, you can find that feeling. We were discussing quite a lot before and during we made the music, what kind of feelings we were dealing with here and on the songs – even though they are quite uptempo – everywhere you can find that melancholia, but also different feelings of course, like you said aggression and desperation in ‘The Slave That You Are’ and maybe sadness in ‘Me My Enemy’; but also I think there is melancholia there and also I think there is something beautiful about melancholia, because it is not necessarily something that is only dark, it is a beautiful feeling also. I think it is an important part of the Green Carnation universe.
It is also a kind of pathway to everything you already have experienced in life, to your past…
Absolutely and also me, myself I like the autumn quite well. There is a lot of melancholia in how I like the autumn. It is like things that die during the autumn, but then you know they are going to come to life again after the winter. Most of the times there is also hope in melancholia, so I think it is a beautiful thing.
For many fans – including me – ‘Light Of Day, Day Of Darkness’ remains the top album of the year 2001. What did it do with the band? Was it a blessing or a curse for Green Carnation? For instance, because you are pinpointed on that album forever now…
(chuckles) No, I think it has been a blessing for us, because it opened doors to many of the things we have been able to do after and I talk a little bit about Green Carnation in all interviews, about our roots and also in the press texts from the label. Their sales text kind of tells the origin and Green Carnation today as well. They said that we returned to epic storytelling, long epic stories like ‘Light Of Day, Day Of Darkness’, with the trilogy and I can understand that, because they are both extraordinary projects. ‘Light Of Day…’ was – as you know – just one track, one hour of music. You need to listen to it from the start to the finish to kind of get all the ideas and that’s what I tried to tell a little bit earlier too. With this project we want people to be able to listen to album one and don’t think that anything is missing and the same with album two, but again, I think when everybody hears it and listens to album number three, they are going to understand that this is all connected. It is a very ambitious thing to say I guess, but I have my reasons for it and you will understand everything when you listen to album three. Musically at least and also graphically. I am not really bothered about what people ask about ‘Light Of Day…’, because Green Carnation has a proud history with doing exactly what we want to do all the time. It is like the label. Although Season Of Mist is quite a big label, they had not done anything to kind of interrupt our ideas with new ideas. We have 100% freedom when it comes to the band. Everybody that we work with, with the artwork and with the titles, everything. I know the band, it would not be something that we would want. For example decide which producer. I don’t think they do that with bands anyway, but at least they would understand that Green Carnation is a band that needs 100% freedom to do whatever they want and I think that is when we work the best. Another example. Some people were asking us after ‘Light Of Day’…’ if we were going to do a one hour song again on the follow-up. Probably that would have been the stupidest thing we could do, because we did something special with ‘Light Of Day, Day Of Darkness’ and for an artist, trying to copy themselves is the least interesting thing you can do. We want to explore new things and we wanted to explore a lot of different sides of Green Carnation in the early 2000’s with all the albums. Coming back after ten years and now it is 25 years since ‘Light Of Day…’ almost and we have grown as human beings, we have grown as musicians of course and the kind of drive is still the same. We want to have 100% artistic freedom to do and express exactly what we want to do here and now. It wouldn’t be possible to share it with so many people if we did not make those two first albums. We are aware of that. Of course it is a special album and it still is a special album for us and we know that it is still very special for many other people, but I have never seen it as anything else than some kind of blessing.
It was not meant to be rude, that blessing or a curse…
I understand, but some people would think that maybe. There are some bigger issues than that for the band, because the band is always looking forward, not looking back. I don’t think any band, a successful band, is looking back. They just look ahead. New challenges and new areas to explore and that has been the case for us ever since.
Can you tell a bit about the last track ‘Too Close To The Flame’?
That is the longest song on the album and I told you that we had all the new songs and we tried to compose an album out of it. It was obvious for me and Stein which one was going to be the first one on the album ‘As Silence Took You’, but it was also quite obvious for me that ‘Too Close To The Flame’ needed to be the last song of the first album, because it has got that extremely epic building up. It is a strange song, because you have two parts and in the middle of the second part, you kind of go back to the first part and then it goes to an epic explosion in the end. It sounds like a regular, more rocky song in the start, but it ends as something completely different, which I really enjoy about that song and I do think that it is a perfect song to end an album with. I am quite happy with how we put the album together, because I think everything suits really well together. After ‘Me My Enemy’ you suddenly have this explosion of ‘The Slave That You Are’, it takes you down a bit with the title track and then you end off with a high note in ‘Too Close To The Flame’. It is also fun to play that song, we experienced that during rehearsals. You feel ‘now it is as big as it can be’ and then suddenly it gets even bigger. If we manage to get that out in the audience, it will be a great live track for the next couple of years as well.
The next step is going on tour and doing gigs of course. I see there is already a special show in September next year…
Yes in our hometown Kristiansand. It is one year minus three days (chuckles). That is going to be a huge concert for us. It is in our hometown. It is in the building I am sitting in right now, because I actually work there as well. It is going to be with a super orchestra and it is going to be with the guests on the albums. And all three albums are going to be played in one evening to celebrate the trinity. There are already been people from 14 different countries buying tickets from all over the world. So it is a huge happening for us, an extremely special evening for the local audience, for also for the ones who actually use a lot of time and money to go to a little city in Norway to see us play live. It is going to be a Green Carnation weekend. We can do stuff on the Friday, or on Saturday during the day we can do signings and stuff. So that is going to be amazing. Other than that we are keen on doing festivals and special shows for 2026 now and there is a beginning of a lot of interest now. After the reception of the album it is growing. Bookers and promoters can see we are playing live now and we have released an album that’s been really well received, so that opens doors. Like today, we have accepted a festival offer from the Netherlands. There are a few more we are discussing with right now and of course we have the Summer Festivals. So hopefully we will be able next year – before the third album comes out – to tour and going around with songs from the first and second part and after the third album comes out, after next Summer, we can do like a full blown show. Sometimes on festivals it is only 45 minutes and sometimes it is one hour and half, sometimes even more, so we will be able to do whatever is possible with the set list. The set list will suit festivals and special shows. I don’t think there will be a five or six weeks European tour and then a very long US and South America tour, but I do think you are going to find us on both festivals and maybe some special shows. We look forward to travel around and share our music with people.
That is splendid. I am looking forward to that.
Hopefully that’s going to happen next year. At least we are super open to come and play. We know we are not an easy band to book, because we are probably nine or ten people travelling now, with Green Carnation. So just a drive to the next city in Norway is expensive for us, but I do think that we will be able to do hopefully quite a lot of festivals and special shows and maybe a mini tour together with another band for example next year. At least we are open for that.
I am going to wish you a lot of luck!
Thank you
