ENSLAVED – “We Never Were Satanists”

Enslaved guitarist Ivar Bjørnson spoke to Noisey about the band’s success and establishing longevity and survival in the metal world. An excerpt below:

Noisey: Given the length of your career, do you still keep up with folks who were in the early black metal community?

Bjørnson: “No, not so much. We do meet at festivals. We keep bumping into Ihsahn and we sort of relate in the music that we do now, both gravitating towards proggy things, but not so much on a personal level. That tends to be more of the bands that we tour with now and that we met in later years, the more active bands. Not many of the other bands from that time that we sort of came up with are doing the same things we are. A lot of them are either split-up or do the occasional reunion show or are in a different place. I feel we’re a little bit alone in sort of still living and working on the road.”

Noisey: To what would you attribute your longevity?

Bjørnson: “There are many good reasons. The thing is that I guess we were a lot younger as a band. They hit the difficult 30s before us, when people start realizing they want families and kids. Most important is that it’s hard to keep the motivation up when your original motivation is as flimsy as it was for most of them. So much of their identities were bound up in this super dangerous Satanic thing, which wasn’t really probed or anything. You could do anonymous interviews, do animal sacrifices, and a lot of terrible things. At some point around 28 to 32, it becomes hard to maintain that kind of front. You’re older, you’ve got a family, and you get confronted by it all the time. It gets a bit bothersome when people remind you of what you’ve said and done. I can see that becoming hard to maintain a steady identity in your band when you’ve built so much of it on these teenage desires to be seen or feared. Out of all those people from those days, there are still like maybe one or two percent who still have some philosophic connection to those thoughts today. It’s hard to be a tough guy with a little baby on your arm.

“For us it was the other way around, we sort of had to defend ourselves from the black metal world and explain ourselves because we were way too positive to be black metal. We lost a lot of publicity and tours back then that we’re making up for now. Last year we had a thing where a British newspaper wanted to do a weekend feature, four pages on us, but to do it they wanted us to do this thing where we confronted our teenage years as Satanists. We never were Satanists. They wanted us to just say that we were, but we said, ‘No, we’re not going to go do that, find someone else.’ The suggestion that we would be regretful former Satanists was just weird, so we missed this potentially magnificent feature.”

Enslaved recently finished a North American tour with Between The Buried And Me.