Kvelertak: Band On The Brink
KVELERTAK are a band on the brink. It’s no secret the Norwegian six-piece thrive off of creating chaos. From the breakneck intensity of their live shows, where vocalist Ivar Nikolaisen is as likely to throttle giant flags in your face as he is stubbing out cigarettes with his hand, to their on-your-toes approach to songwriting, leaving you constantly guessing where they’re going next, to their well-documented off-stage antics and bust-ups. And in naming their fifth album Endling, they’re being on-the-nose about it.
“It definitely feels like that for many of us, it’s a very intense band to be in,” reflects guitarist and founding member Vidar Landa, as night falls upon his Norwegian home. “Sometimes it feels like it’s going to explode, or implode, at some point.”
Whilst Endling has “all the big themes like it’s life, death, it’s families falling out, it’s hate, love, all that”, they avoided the same old stories about Thor and his hammer, so “instead of going to the classical mythology, we found these stories that not even people living in Norway had ever heard about.”
Endling isn’t just about telling the tales time forgot. It’s a reaction to the pandemic that tainted their experience of releasing Splid, and gave birth to Endling’s creative process. For Landa, Nikolaisen, guitarists Bjarte Lund Rolland and Maciek Ofstad, bassist Marvin Nygaard, and drummer Håvard Takle Ohr, they were “tired of people talking about the pandemic, of people talking about reality.”
It got KVELERTAK thinking. They thought “it would be cool, if this pandemic lasts forever, however the world is going to look when this album is released, we want something that even if they don’t understand Norwegian, they can read the lyrics and maybe they see a name, or they see a place, and they can find a book or they can google it, they can look at the artwork and imagine themselves there”. Deep down, it was to achieve “some sort of escapism”.
It wasn’t just escapism for the listeners either, it was for themselves. In fact, escapism became an integral factor in Endling’s experimental nature. By looking to escape, it “took me back to what got me into music in the first place. It’s something about that time where you had a CD and you didn’t know too much about a band or what they’re singing about, you could spend time in your room imagining this world of music or lyrics.”
As Landa and co. dusted off old books and dug into their homeland’s hidden history, they found it “felt like going into a fantasy world at times, which is something I haven’t done since reading Tolkien when I was a teenager.” By making the songwriting process “fun in a childish way”, they used the extra time off touring to go back to basics: making music just to make music.
“Nobody was waiting for a new album, and there weren’t any tours, so it was really nice to just start writing music, not because we needed to have an album out, but because we were writing just for the sake of writing songs,” Landa enthuses, like a kid in a candy shop on pocket money day. For the whole band, they felt they had the freedom a debut album gives you, only they’re five albums in. “Apart from maybe a pandemic stopping the world, it’s not a chance you get in a career again to just write for the sake of writing without having a deadline, or an album, or a tour, or something that’s planned.”
Endling, like Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory, is a weird album in all the right ways. It’s got the blackened punk, the rock-and-roll, the on-fire fretboards. It’s got the nods to MASTODON, to THIN LIZZY, to BLACK SABBATH and BARONESS. But it’s not afraid to nod to THE WHITE STRIPES and THE HIVES’ garage-punk, it’s not too cool to flirt with flower power theatrics from the seventies, and it’s not afraid to plop it in a mixing bowl and make a cake.
So, how does a band unlock so much creativity aside from just writing songs for no reason at all? You lock yourself in a 24-hour studio with three producers and do everything live. “The producers insisted we did all the basic tracking live, which we’ve only done one time before on Nattesferd, but it was more dogmatic and we played to click, where this time we captured the energy of the live basic tracks and then we were allowed to go in and fix guitars and do overdubs.”
Whilst it can be a “pretty stressful situation with six musicians doing it live”, because “everybody has to be at their best, and it’s not always that you agree on what is the best take, when somebody has a great take, maybe somebody else isn’t happy,” they had producers – Jørgen Træen, Yngve Sætre, and ENSLAVED’s Iver Sandøy – who “could lead the way”, letting KVELERTAK find time to make it “sound more experimental”.
In doing so, Endling puts to bed the things Splid, for Landa at least, got wrong. “Sometimes it felt like I was exhausted after those 11 songs, but I felt listening to this new album it felt more like when it was done, I could put it on again.” For KVELERTAK, it’s always been about “trying to keep it interesting enough for ourselves and our listeners, we want people to have a good time, we don’t want to be boring.”
For a band always on the brink of breaking up or breaking through, KVELERTAK are many things, but they’re certainly not boring.
Endling is out now via Rise Records/Petroleum Records.
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