Dimmu Borgir frontman Shagrath remembers queuing up at an ATM in central Oslo when he was recognised by a group of local metalheads. Rather than giving a nod of appreciation, one of them offered a withering put-down: “Oh, are you going to take out some royalties then?”
This wasn’t recently, or even during the band’s initial breakthrough in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Rather, the year was 1994, and the band had only just released their debut seven-inch single, Inn I Evighetens Mørke, (‘Into The Darkness Of Eternity’) amidst a black metal scene still churning in the wake of Mayhem mastermind Euronymous’s murder and an ongoing wave of church burnings across the country.
No one then could have suspected that the makers of this embryonic three-track, keyboard-laden lament would go on to become the best-selling, and subsequently one of the most divisive, black metal bands of all time, but it was clear they were going to have to get used to being called sellouts from the start.
We knew we would get flamed for signing to Nuclear Blast
Silenoz
Shagrath (real name Stian Thoresen) had formed Dimmu Borgir with fellow 17-year-olds Kenneth Åkesson (aka Tjodalv) and Sven Atle Kopperud (aka Silenoz) a year earlier in the small town of Jessheim, 30 miles north of Oslo. Shagrath previously led his own teenage black metal band, Fimbulwinter, while his new bandmates had played in short-lived death metal groups before seeing the dark and switching musical allegiance.
“It was exciting times and dangerous times,” says Silenoz now. “When that stuff with the church burnings went down, we heard about people who were starting to wear knives and weapons, so we did the same. But if you were walking down the street in Oslo, the police would just stop you out of nowhere and search you because you were wearing black and fitted a certain description.”
The band initially called themselves Dimmuborgir, after an area of lava fields and rock formations in northern Iceland whose name means ‘dark castles’.
“We wanted a name that suited the darkness and atmosphere of what we were doing,” says Silenoz of the moniker, which was soon split into two words. “I always said later that if we wanted to be more commercial, we would have taken a different name.”
The trio’s initial roles in the band were in flux: all three would play guitar and bass, Shagrath doubled up on drums, while Silenoz did the majority of the vocals with Shagrath occasionally pitching in. But they resolved early on that they were going to focus on the musical and spiritual side of black metal rather than scene politics – sowing the seeds of an ambitious drive that would come to define them later.
Inspired by the likes of Emperor, Enslaved and Gehenna, they realised what they really wanted were some keyboards to add to the dark atmosphere that had emerged from the rehearsals. Silenoz roped in his childhood neighbour, Stian Aarstad, to that end. However, in a precursor of issues to come, getting him properly integrated in the band would prove insurmountable.
“He hardly ever turned up at rehearsals,” says Shagrath. “It was frustrating, creating melodies on keyboard was always as important as the guitar. But getting Stian to do anything was a fucking nightmare.”
Dimmu Borgir recorded their debut album, For All Tid, in 1994 and released it the following year, by which time they’d been joined by bassist Brynjard Tristan. Reflecting the conditions in which it was rehearsed (“It was a freezing cold, damp warehouse and the equipment was really shit, but that’s how you did it then,” is Silenoz’s recollection), its insular if evocative grimness remains a marker point for both a scene in total opposition to the world around it, and a band tentatively embarking on their own path.
The follow-up, Stormblåst, once again featuring Silenoz on vocals, was released a year later. But the band’s lack of experience – combined with their use of an engineer they didn’t gel with – meant Dimmu were reaching the limits of what they could achieve, falling short of their ever-growing ambitions. Where they went next not only dramatically altered the fortunes of Dimmu Borgir, it changed the landscape of black metal itself.
Dimmu might have been frustrated by the discrepancy between their vision and the reality with Stormblåst, but one person who saw the potential was Markus Staiger. The owner of increasingly influential German label Nuclear Blast, he’d been following their progress and was looking to sign black metal bands to the label’s roster.
“We knew we would get flamed for signing to Nuclear Blast,” says Silenoz. “But they had a few other really good bands, so we thought, ‘Why can’t we?’ We still had that underground mentality, but we knew that we just couldn’t go ahead with that kind of behaviour anymore.”
Their debut album for Nuclear Blast was 1997’s Enthrone Darkness Triumphant. Produced by Hypocrisy frontman Peter Tägtgren, it saw Shagrath moving to vocals, replaced on drums by Tjodalv, with Silenoz focusing on guitar. They were joined by new bassist/guitarist Nagash who brought what Shagrath calls a “creative weirdness” that helped broaden Dimmu’s sound.
Drawing on everything from huge-scale classic composers such as Richard Wagner, Antonín Dvořák and fellow Norwegian Edvard Grieg, to the vaulting goth rock of Fields Of The Nephilim, the album introduced a new level of bombast to black metal.
We never had any bad blood with Cradle Of Filth.
Silenoz
Its sonic scope took Dimmu out of the symphonic shadows of Cradle Of Filth and Emperor, and subsequently became the band’s ornate calling card. Silenoz remembers being told at the time that their label boss, Markus Staiger, had gone apeshit in response to hearing tracks from it for the first time.
“I immediately thought, ‘Oh, he’s pissed off,’” he recalls. “But I was told it was because he thought it was so good, and he put a ton of fucking money into the promotion campaign on that album.”
Enthrone Darkness Triumphant arrived at a time when the black metal scene was in the throes of evolution. Between 1996 and 1997, many of its key bands released transformational albums, including Cradle Of Filth, Emperor, Satyricon, Enslaved, Arcturus and Sigh. Enthrone Darkness Triumphant eclipsed them all, going on to sell upwards of 300,000 copies. But their artistic success didn’t come without some pushback, not least from other musicians.
“I could sense the envy, for the lack of a better word,” says Silenoz. “But it was also mixed with ‘How the fuck did you do this?’, because the sound was so polished compared to what everyone was known to listen to. They thought that probably we had sold our asses for a huge sum of money. That’s when I noticed people starting to make up assumptions about how things were. And in hindsight, that’s when people really started opening their mouths about what they thought.”
Rumours circulated of a rivalry between Dimmu and Cradle Of Filth, with Cradle’s Dani Filth supposedly taking umbrage at the Norwegians stealing his own band’s thunder. Today, Shagrath and Silenoz are adamant that there was no beef.
“We never had any bad blood,” Shagrath says of Cradle, with whom Dimmu had played a handful of shows in Germany just before Enthrone Darkness Triumphant was released. “I remember I was quite impressed how actually professional they were, and they inspired us to sharpen our knives after that tour. Music has never been about competition for me. It’s about being creative and the art aspects of it. There was some piss-taking, but nothing more than that.”
Dani need not have worried. When both bands appeared at the 1997 Dynamo festival, Cradle played the main stage while Dimmu Borgir were stuck on a dedicated black metal stage alongside Satyricon and Dissection. But billing was the least of their worries that day.
“We were on the way to get the boat over,” Shagrath recalls, “and Stian Arstaad calls me saying, ‘Hey, I can’t make it.’ He didn’t get permission from his parents or he was going into the military or something, I don’t know.”
Unwilling to tolerate anything less than total commitment, his bandmates were unimpressed and it marked the end of Stian’s time in the band. Family commitments meant that founding member Tjodalv couldn’t give himself fully to Dimmu’s increased touring schedule, and he left shortly after the band’s next album, 1999’s Spiritual Black Dimensions. It was the start of a long-running drama of hirings and firings that ultimately consolidated Shagrath and Silenoz as the band’s creative core.
Spiritual Black Dimensions saw the introduction of Mustis on keyboards, and ICS Vortex as guest vocalist, later to become a full-time member taking on bass duties too. His impressively sky-razing howl would, for a time, become another signature part of their sound, and if …Dimensions upped the theatricality even further, 2001’s Puritanical Euphoric Misanthropia brought in a full orchestra, as well as former Cradle Of Filth drummer Nick Barker and a new lead guitarist, Galder.
Their biggest step into the mainstream consciousness, however, came with 2003’s sweepingly ambitious Death Cult Armageddon, whose imperious second track, Progenies Of The Great Apocalypse, appeared in the trailer for Guillermo del Toro’s acclaimed comic book adaptation, Hellboy.
“That and playing Ozzfest helped catapult us in the States for sure,” says Silenoz. “I was in a cinema with my girlfriend at the time in Texas. The trailer came on, and it was our music. It was like, ‘Fuck, that was a trip!’”
But internal tensions were starting to manifest, and yet more line-up changes followed. By the time of 2007’s concept album, In Sorte Diaboli, Nick Barker had been replaced by Mayhem drummer Hellhammer.
People say, ‘Oh that’s the best era, when Barker, ICS and Mustis were in the band’, but it was a ticking fucking time bomb
Silenoz
Yet more changes were afoot with the release of 2010’s maximalist mindfuck, Abrahadabra. Gone were the three-word titles, and the stage costumes had been changed from customary black to a winter wonderland white, but most noticeable was the absence of ICS Vortex and Mustis – two members many fans felt were integral to the band’s sound.
“People say, ‘Oh that’s the best era, when Barker, ICS and Mustis were in the band’, but it was a ticking fucking time bomb, and people had no clue what was going on behind the scenes,” says Shagrath. “Sometimes you need to make some changes; you have two options, and that’s to break up the band or move forward, and we chose to move forward.”
Bitter words were exchanged between both parties, though hatchets were buried when Mustis and ICS Vortex joined Dimmu Borgir onstage at 2024’s Inferno festival in Oslo. For Silenoz, there are lessons to be learned on both sides.
“Looking back, maybe everybody involved could have handled it a little bit better,” he says. “We felt like we got attacked. They probably felt that they weren’t heard and seen, so they teamed up against us and we felt we had to retaliate. But there’s been water under the bridge for a few years now, so it turned out to be a fun thing to do, and it was cool for the fans as well.”
Today, Shagrath and Silenoz are the sole remaining founder members of Dimmu Borgir (the next longest-tenured member, Galder, left in 2024 after 24 years).
“In many ways, you forge a bond maybe without even knowing it,” says Silenoz of the evolution of his and Shagrath’s musical partnership. “That carries on into the creative part of things. It all comes down to having something that you really are convinced about, that this is what you’re supposed to do.”
Whether the various personnel changes of the last two decades have impacted on their work rate isn’t clear, but the fact remains that the gap between Dimmu Borgir albums has grown. 2018’s Eonian arrived eight years after Abrahadabra, and the same gap separates the former from Dimmu’s new album, Grand Serpent Rising.
“It has been a very long process,” Shagrath admits. “But a more comfortable one, because we had time to focus on the small details, which is an important thing in Dimmu. We work with the band day and night, five days a week, so there are always things happening behind the scenes that might not be apparent.”
Although Shagrath will talk of creative differences in the painstaking making of albums, and the challenges and frustrations involved in overcoming them, they’re bonded by the mutual respect they still have for each other.
“It’s when we put our heads together that the magic happens,” he says. “You have to swallow some pride sometimes to make each other shine. It’s not easy, but it’s worked for 33 years now, and we’re still friends. The last line-up changes have made us a bit closer also. We communicate better, and right now the vibes of this band are incredible. I haven’t felt that joy for probably over a decade.”
Ask Shagrath and Silenoz what they want Dimmu to be remembered for, and they will both agree that it’s their refusal to compromise, rather than play to expectations, that’s taken them to their rarefied, top-dog status.
“We’ve never been afraid of going into places that other bands wouldn’t dare to go,” says Shagrath. “Hopefully we’ll be remembered for a band that crossed boundaries, and, basically, refused to play ball.”
Grand Serpent Rising is out now via Nuclear Blast. Dimmu Borgir play London's Brixton Academy on October 17.
