Satyricon vocalist Sigurd “Satyr” Wongraven has looked back on the strange night his diabolical black metal band played at a Norwegian fashion show.
The Oslo duo performed their 2006 single K.I.N.G. on the catwalk at the 2011 edition of the Nordic World Ski Championships, playing the snarling metal track as models walked past in high-end dresses. Looking back during an interview with Metal Hammer, Wongraven, 50, calls the booking “bizarre” and admits he still has no clue who came up with the idea.
“The production was done by NRK, which is Norway’s equivalent to the BBC,” he explains. “And if you do anything with NRK, they will do it exactly the way that they want to. They’re not gonna sit down with a band and go, ‘How do you want it, guys?’”
The only theory Wongraven can come up with is that the organisers wanted to blend skiing, something “deeply rooted in our [Norwegian] sporting culture”, with black metal, “something else that is uniquely Norwegian”, and “show it to the world”. But, “I have no idea who came up with the idea to blend it with a fashion show!”
Elsewhere in the interview, Wongraven talks further about the creation of K.I.N.G., the lead single from his band’s 2006 album, Now, Diabolical. The heavy, groovy track – sometimes referred to as ‘black’n’roll’, a term Satyricon reject – saw the band remove keyboards and technical drum parts from their sound.
“Now, Diabolical was trusting more that a song could be more powerful if we strip it of unnecessary elements,” Wongraven recalls. “When you think of Iron Man by Black Sabbath or Let There Be Rock by AC/DC, you think of the signature riff, and when you have a riff that can carry a whole song on its shoulders, everything from this point onwards is about what complements that part.”
Upon release in April 2006, Now, Diabolical was the band’s biggest commercial hit, reaching number two on the Norwegian charts. It also charted in Finland, Sweden and the UK. K.I.N.G. became their biggest song: at time of publication, it has 19,800,000 Spotify streams, more than double their next-biggest track, 2002’s Black Crow On A Tombstone.
Satyricon’s last album, 2022’s Satyricon & Munch, marked a stark departure from their black metal sound. It was a single, hour-long, atmospheric song, designed to soundtrack the art exhibition of the same name that the band put on at Oslo’s Edvard Munch Museum. In 2024, Wongraven said that Satyricon’s next album will be “more conventional” but “very, very varied”.
The band will tour Europe from September to November. The first show will take place at the Floyd venue in Athens, Greece on September 18. On October 31, they’ll support Dimmu Borgir at Oslo Spektrum in their hometown, with Enslaved opening. They’re also booked to headline Damnation festival in Manchester on November 8.
