Green Carnation first spoke about creating a three-album saga in the mid-2000s. Two decades later, the Norwegians have finally releasing the first chapter of their A Dark Poem trilogy. Vocalist Kjetil Nordhus tells Prog about Part I: The Shores Of Melancholia and teases the two records they recorded alongside it.
Kjetil Nordhus has one piece of advice for anyone trying to make three albums at the same time. “I wouldn’t recommend it,” the Green Carnation singer says. “I’m 50 this year; over the last 10 years I’ve learned the difference between something being 97% good and 100% good. You use a lot of time on the last 5%.”
The Norwegian band’s new album A Dark Poem, Part I: The Shores Of Melancholia is the first entry in an eventual trilogy – the band’s The Lord Of The Rings, with its constituent pieces released individually, despite being completed as one enormous whole.
The band came up with the trilogy concept 20 years ago; but The Shores Of Melancholia wasn’t announced until mere hours before our interview. The follow-up to 2020 comeback album Leaves Of Yesteryear expands on the strong music that brought them back to the dance.
Opener As Silence Took You reminds us of where we left off , as hard doom-metal riffs crash against lush synths and Nordhus’ emotional voice. From there, though, the band open up to new possibilities, continuing with In Your Paradise’s exuberant prog-rock theatrics. The semi-acoustic title track and the 10-minute finale Too Close To The Flame are bold too.
But two songs are clearly the most out-there: the hypnotic psychedelia of Me My Enemy is instantly contrasted by The Slave That You Are, which starts in an extreme metal stampede featuring guest howls from Enslaved’s Grutle Kjellson.
“Me My Enemy points towards the 70s, like this Pink Floyd-ish world,” Nordhus says, “and then suddenly, in comes the extreme metal! We were having a bit of fun with it – imagining the reactions of people drinking coffee in the morning and listening to the album.”
Green Carnation’s career has been undeniably start-stop. Guitarist Terje Vik ‘Tchort’ Schei formed the band as a teenager, only to pack it in shortly afterwards and join black metal mavericks Emperor.
They returned in 2000 with debut album Journey To The End Of Night, and Nordhus came aboard ahead of the recording of 2001’s single-song, 60-minute opus Light Of Day, Day Of Darkness. Following three more studio albums – one prog, one straightforward rock, one acoustic – the band were put to bed again.
“After doing all these different kinds of albums and not receiving the success that we felt we deserved, we didn’t know where to go,” Nordhus admits. “Tchort, being the founding member and having a closer relationship to the band name, called it a day.”
The trilogy idea came to Tchort around the time of that second disbandment. Nordhus recalls the guitarist talking about three connected albums “in the same sentence as telling the world we were going to break up!” When they reunited once more in 2014, the plan was resurrected with them We agreed on a five-album deal with Season Of Mist and the trilogy was part of it,” Nordhus says.
Writing for both Leaves Of Yesteryear and A Dark Poem began in 2017 or 18. The Leaves material wasn’t too tricky – it included a Black Sabbath cover and a re-recording of early track My Dark Reflections Of Life And Death. But composing a three-album epic at once was, unsurprisingly, a demanding task.
“Me and Stein Roger [Sordal, bass] went to a little house in the mountains to focus solely on the trilogy,” Nordhus says. “We’d stay there for three to four to five days, locking out the entire world and just writing music. To write that amount of music at the level we wanted to does take a lot of time.”
The lyrics on The Shores Of Melancholia were largely written by Sordal, whose wife is living with a brain tumour after partially-successful surgery in 2017. “His personal life with his wife is evident in our lyrics,” Nordhus says. “How he sees the world is the theme of the album. I think the topic of loneliness, or the fear of loneliness, could have something to do with it.
Even though the creative part is finished now, we need to put a lot of effort into the live bit
The first record also explores feelings of mistrust and alienation. “Nobody knows exactly what’s going on in the world any more,” Nordhus continues. “Even on social media, with AI and stuff like that, you don’t really know what’s true. We’re 50 years old now, and maybe not the fastest ones to understand everything that’s happening in technological evolution.”
The lyrical themes of the Dark Poem releases aren’t directly connected. Rather than a narrative, they form a musical triptych, each part possessing a distinct sonic identity. They were recorded from April to December 2024, apart from a mini-album epilogue that was tracked in summer 2025. Nordhus won’t give specifics, but he describes the second album as “slow and beautiful” and the third as “something we’ve never done before.”
He elaborates: “I don’t know of many bands who have done it. We’re cooperating with someone else and, in the prog way of thinking, the last part of the album refers to the first two-and-a-half albums musically, but in a different way. Different instrumentation.”
A Dark Poem, Part II has a release date of 2026. After the third album lands, Green Carnation hope to spend time on the road, especially considering the events of 2020 scuppered live plans following Leaves Of Yesteryear.
“I don’t think we’re going to be a band that go on a two-month US tour and then spend a month in Europe,” says Nordhus. “We’re extremely proud of the three albums and we want to be extremely proud of every show we do.
“You want to honour your efforts. Even though the creative part is finished now, we need to put a lot of effort into the live bit. We cannot allow ourselves to do something that is not 100% live. Everything is connected.”
A Dark Poem Part I: The Shores Of Melancholia is on sale now via Season Of Mist.
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