Emperor: Black Metal's Grandest, Live at Inferno

Most black metal wants to sound like a blizzard in a car park. Emperor wanted to sound like a cathedral catching fire. That single ambition, held from a Norwegian mining town in the early nineties, is why they remain the genre’s grandest act three decades on — and why watching them reassemble on a Norwegian stage is such a strange, freighted experience.

Emperor formed in Notodden in 1991, a small industrial town in Telemark with more waterfalls than nightlife. The two constants were Ihsahn — born Vegard Sverre Tveitan — on vocals and guitar, and Samoth, Tomas Haugen, on guitar and later drums. They were teenagers with keyboards and a very serious idea about what heavy music could be. Where most of the early Norwegian scene prized rawness and speed above all, Emperor reached for scale: layered synths, tremolo guitar lines stacked like organ pipes, and a sense of composition that owed as much to Romantic classical music as to Bathory. The result was a sound that felt vast, ceremonial, almost liturgical.

Anthems to a colder god

The debut, In the Nightside Eclipse, arrived in 1994 and it still functions as the genre’s high-water mark for ambition. The production is famously murky, the keyboards buried in fog, and yet the sheer architecture of the songs comes through — long-form pieces that build and recede like weather systems. It is black metal that wants to be symphonic, and mostly succeeds through force of will rather than budget. Nobody at that point was writing music this structurally busy at this tempo.

Then came Anthems to the Welkin at Dusk in 1997, which is where the grandeur fully lands. Cleaner production, sharper playing, and Ihsahn’s compositions opening out into something genuinely orchestral. The riffs move in counterpoint, the drums (now handled by Trym Torson) blast with real precision, and the whole thing carries a sweep that most of their peers never approached. It is the album that made “symphonic black metal” a category worth naming rather than a contradiction in terms. IX Equilibrium followed in 1999 and Prometheus: The Discipline of Fire & Demise in 2001, the latter an almost avant-garde record where Ihsahn’s compositional restlessness starts pulling the band apart at the seams.

Musically, the Emperor signature is density. There is always more happening than a first listen registers — a keyboard line answering a guitar figure, a drum fill cutting against the riff, a vocal shifting from shriek to spoken menace. It rewards the attention you give it, and it is why the band aged better than a lot of their contemporaries. Where classic Norwegian black metal often prized a single overwhelming atmosphere, Emperor built songs you could get lost inside. That instinct for scale connects them to fellow travellers like Enslaved, the Bergen band who took Viking and black metal somewhere equally expansive — the two acts represent the ambitious, compositional wing of a scene often caricatured as pure nihilism.

The shadow that will not lift

You cannot write honestly about Emperor without the crimes, and there is no cleaning them up. The early Norwegian black metal scene of the early nineties produced extraordinary records and, alongside them, real violence — church arsons, and killings — and Emperor sat close to the centre of it. The full, ugly history of that period is worth understanding on its own terms, and it is covered elsewhere in the Norwegian black metal story.

The specific weight Emperor carry is their drummer. Bård Guldvik Eithun, who performed as Faust, murdered a man named Magne Andreassen in Lillehammer on 21 August 1992. Andreassen, who was gay, was stabbed to death in the town’s Olympic park. Eithun was arrested in 1993, confessed, and was sentenced in 1994 to fourteen years in prison; he was released in 2003 after serving a little over nine. Those are the documented facts, and they are not decoration or edge. A man was killed. Faust also took part in church burnings during the same period.

I state this plainly because the genre has a long, bad habit of treating that history as folklore — a spooky origin myth to sell reissues. It is not folklore. It is a homophobic killing and a string of arsons, committed by people who were making some of the most interesting extreme music of the decade, and both of those things are true at once. Emperor’s music is magnificent. The crimes connected to the band are real and indefensible. Holding both facts in your head without letting either erase the other is the only honest way to listen.

Live at Inferno, and the reunion question

Emperor split in 2001, Ihsahn and Samoth going their separate ways — Ihsahn into a genuinely adventurous solo career that pushed toward progressive metal, Samoth into the more brutal Zyklon. The band has reconvened periodically since, and the best-documented artefact of those reunions has a fitting name.

Live Inferno, released in 2009, was recorded partly at the Inferno Metal Festival in Oslo in 2006, with a second disc captured at Wacken the same year. It is the definitive live document of the reunited band, and the Inferno setting is perfect: Norway’s flagship extreme-metal festival, held over Easter in the capital, hosting the return of one of the country’s defining acts. The festival has always understood its role as a keeper of the scene’s history, and giving Emperor that stage was a statement about lineage as much as lineup.

Watching Emperor reassemble at all is a peculiar thing. The music has aged into something close to modern classical — those Anthems pieces demand real ensemble precision, and the reunited band plays them with a control the murky early recordings only implied. Ihsahn on stage is a study in contained intensity: no theatrics to speak of, corpse paint mostly retired, just a man delivering compositions he wrote as a teenager with the seriousness they always deserved. The grandeur that felt aspirational on the debut is simply present now, filled out by a road-hardened band and a proper PA.

The reunions raise the harder question too. Faust rejoined the touring band for various reformed-Emperor shows, and every one of those appearances reopens the argument about whether a convicted murderer belongs on a festival stage being cheered. There is no comfortable answer, and I distrust anyone who offers one too quickly. My own position is that the music can be great and the man’s crime can be unforgivable, and that a festival crowd roaring for the drummer should at least know what it is roaring for. The scene’s worst instinct has always been to aestheticise the violence, to fold real dead people into the mythology. The music does not need that. Anthems to the Welkin at Dusk is a masterpiece on its own terms.

The live music as modern composition

There is a specific pleasure in watching the reunited Emperor play the Anthems material, and it took me a while to work out what it was. These are pieces of real compositional complexity — interlocking guitar lines, keyboard countermelodies, drum patterns that argue with the riff rather than simply propelling it — and on the original recordings the murk of the production hid half of that work. Live, with a proper sound system and a band that has spent years relearning its own catalogue, the architecture finally becomes audible. You hear the counterpoint. You hear how much was going on all along.

That is why an Emperor set plays less like a black metal show and more like a demanding orchestral programme delivered at extreme volume. The audience does not mosh through it so much as stand and absorb it, heads tilted slightly, the way you might at a performance of something genuinely difficult. Ihsahn conducts it from the front with minimal fuss, and the payoff is a kind of awe that most extreme metal, built for aggression rather than contemplation, never reaches for.

The Norwegian scene at large has always contained this ambitious wing — bands who treated the genre as a serious compositional medium rather than a shock delivery system — and Emperor were its most fully realised example. Watching them now, decades after the debut, the youthful reach of that first record has been vindicated by a band finally able to play it the way the teenage Ihsahn heard it in his head. The grandeur was never a pose. It was a design brief, and the reunion shows are where it is finally met.

Why the grandeur still matters

Strip away the history and Emperor’s achievement is straightforward: they proved black metal could aim for the sublime. Before them the genre’s ceiling was atmosphere and menace; after them it could be architecture, composition, something that reached for the same emotional altitude as a Mahler symphony while blasting at 200 beats per minute. Every symphonic and orchestral black metal band that followed is working in a room Emperor built.

Ihsahn’s ongoing solo work makes the lineage explicit — restless, progressive, unafraid of saxophone or clean singing or odd time — and it all traces back to the compositional ambition that was there in Notodden in 1991. The band could have been a footnote of the scene’s violent phase. They became its most durable musical statement.

That is the paradox you carry out of an Emperor show: a body of music genuinely worthy of the word grand, made by people whose story includes an act of appalling violence. Norway’s Inferno Festival, over Easter in Oslo, has hosted the reunited band and captured them at their best, and the crowd that gathers is there for the cathedral, the fire, the sheer scale of it. The right thing is to hear the grandeur clearly and refuse to launder the history that came with it. Both are Emperor. Only one of them is worth celebrating.