White Void: Into The Void Of Absurdity

If you asked someone to name a band Lars Nedland was involved with, the chances are they would say BORKNAGOR or SOLEFALD, the progressive black metal outfits he’s been involved with for the past quarter of a century. In 2018 however, the Norwegian found himself writing music that didn’t fit either band’s style – and he didn’t want the material to go to waste.

“The common denominator was that they all had the backbone from the hard rock of the seventies,” he explains. “Additionally, I always had this thing for the way melody was weaved into music from the early eighties, especially the part of new wave that has one foot in punk, and I listened to these songs and decided I’d like to write some more songs in in that direction, particularly as I’d never written in that style before.”

Inspired by the likes of BLUE ÖYSTER CULT and COVEN, but also the melancholy of NEW MODEL ARMY, Lars found a middle ground and had an album before he knew it. Not wanting to have it as a one-off project, he brought Tobias Solbakk, Vegard Kummen and Eivind Marum on board, each with own experiences in metal electronica and blues rock respectively. WHITE VOID was born.

“I’m a terrible guitarist” Lars admits. “But you can’t hide a bad riff behind good technique, so I know that if I can play it, it’s gonna work! But Eivind came in and took my writing and transformed it with his own abilities, and Tobias did the same with the drums. They aren’t hired guns; they had a proper say in how the album sounds and how the songs are twisted into the version that everyone hears.”

Those songs make up Anti, a debut album that explores the philosophies of Albert Camus, specifically his work around absurdism, the notion that individuals should embrace the absurd conditions of human existence. Lars, who has had a keen interest in this area of reading for over two decades, decided to use these for WHITE VOID’s lyrical matter – and, as it turned out, their name.

“I’ve had this fascination with the triangular relationship between absurdism, existentialism and nihilism, because even though they’re rather different philosophies, they have the same starting point, which is called the ‘problem of the absurd’. That’s the distance between what we need as humans when it comes to sense and direction in life and what the universe actually serves us, which is nothing! Existence is absurd: you’re thrown into it and the universe goes ‘there, you exist now, have fun’ and you’re thinking ‘okay, but what am I supposed to do?’ you know? That’s why the band is called WHITE VOID, because you come from and go back to nothingness, which is the black void, but the white void is the only one you can have an actual relation to that is existing at the same time you are.”

What WHITE VOID do superbly, though, is balance out the deep, at times bleak and often contradictory lyrics with some easily accessible hard rock and keyboards and catchy choruses, allowing for a wide range of connections with the music no matter what you’re into. “A lot of hard rock and metal bands underestimate the audiences,” Lars explains. “I’ve been touring for more than 20 years and I’ve met so many intelligent people and academics at my concerts, so thought I okay, if I’m gonna do this, I’m gonna try and do it in a way that means you can just grab a beer, nod to the music, drink a bit and sing along to the to the chorus if you want, but if you want to dive into things there is there stuff to be found there.”

Written throughout 2018 and 2019, Lars had intended most of the first half of 2020 to be spent on the road with BORKNAGAR, but when the pandemic shelved all of that, the opportunity arose to get the WHITE VOID album done instead. “I sat down with Øystein [BORKNAGAR guitarist and producer of Anti] and we were so bummed because we couldn’t go to the States and we said ‘well, we need to turn this into something positive to pre-occupy ourselves, how about we start mixing the WHITE VOID album now?’ What was meant to happen in the summer of 2020 happened in March and April; then I started working with deals and record companies, and before you knew it we had a deal and album release date. We definitely made the most of the hand we were dealt!”

With a desire for WHITE VOID to continue permanently alongside his other projects, Lars Nedland is going to be a rather busy man for the foreseeable future, but if there’s anyone who can make it all work, it’ll definitely be him.

Anti is out now via Nuclear Blast Records. 

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