Ivar Bjørnson is 38 years of age, and this year his band Enslaved celebrated 25 years together, a hefty chunk of time over which they have released 13 studio albums and toured the world several times over.
You might be doing the maths in your head, and the sum you have hit is indeed correct: Bjørnson was all of 13 years old when the band formed in Haugesund, a town in south west Norway some 435km from the nation’s capital, Oslo. If you’re at all familiar with Enslaved, you’ll know they are one of the most celebrated bands on the extreme-metal spectrum, which naturally leads one to ask how an impressionable young lad barely in his teenage years found himself in the midst of some of the heaviest tunage around.
“It was a closed-off world, so to speak,” explains Bjørnson. “We were living in a really rural place, far away in the countryside, so the only way that we found out about this world of death metal was through the radio. By age 11 or maybe 12, we were trekking out to whatever record stores that we could find – although there weren’t that many – to try and find out as much as we could about this music. We wanted to hear what was going on in the scene in the big cities, and we wanted to hear the right kind of bands. I would get my guitar and try and do exactly what they were doing, and I’d get the other kids in the area that played music to try and do the same. I went through a few different kids, just jamming in garages and living rooms, and they were all eager to play music, but it just didn’t end up being for them. Eventually, I found the right combination of kids to start Enslaved. It was a really exciting time: just the discovery of the extreme side of heavy metal was so revelatory to us.”
Fast forward to 2016, and both Bjørnson and co-founding bassist/vocalist Grutle Kjellson have lasted through every inception of the band. The group has significantly evolved in that time, not just in terms of its members, but from a stylistic standpoint as well. Enslaved have incorporated elements of black metal, progessive rock and even Viking mythology through their timeline, and are set to touch on every facet of their sound as they perform two sets a night on their anniversary tour. “This has been a year of reflection,” says Bjørnson.
“The scale and the more professional approach of the band has definitely changed, but away from that surprisingly little has changed. The focus is still on the music itself – we want to collect it, we want to experience it and we want to make music that we would want to listen to ourselves. That’s what we said when we started out, and that’s still what we say now. We are keen observers of many kinds of music and many kinds of art. What we do in this band is our interpretation of those things, and we just try and have fun while we’re doing that.”
Although never a band destined for the mainstream, Enslaved have nevertheless comfortably forged a niche for themselves. This has resulted in securing a global fan base, where hundreds and even thousands of the faithful come out in force to see the band playing live. Enslaved have become a part of many metalheads’ existences over the years – something that Bjørnson does not take for granted.
“It’s very humbing,” he says. “It’s also a way of connecting with people. When they talk about their own experiences that they’ve had and they link them to specific songs or albums, it’s like they’re telling me directly where my music has travelled to and what it has achieved. In that context, I treat the band as something like common ground – Enslaved is something me and the fans have both experienced, however different our experiences may be. I can remember the first time that we played in Perth, we met this guy who had somehow gotten a copy of our first demo mailed out to him. He was the same age as me, so he had followed Enslaved this entire time. His kids were even the same age as my kids. It was like some sort of parallel universe.”
Bjørnson and co. are set to return to said parallel universe this October for a whirlwind three-city tour in three days, taking in Brisbane, Melbourne and Sydney. Despite the bigger-picture differences between the land Down Under and the band’s native land of Norway, Bjørnson insists that there is common ground in the form of the universal language of music, and more specifically, heavy metal music.
“Australia and Norway, surprisingly enough, have quite similar metal scenes,” he explains. “They both developed and started blossoming around the same time, so our reference points are very similar in terms of what albums we were consuming and magazines we were reading.” Bjørnson laughs as he notes one key difference between the two countries.
“Hanging at a pub in Australia and talking about metal with the people that were there isn’t all that different from doing it in Norway – except you guys say the word ‘cunt’ a lot more.”
Enslaved rock the Manning Bar on Friday October 7; andIn Times is out now through Nuclear Blast.
