Oslo, 2011. The Nordic World Ski Championships. In the city’s University Square, a massive gramophone sits at the centre of a neon-lit stage. Dancers wrapped in fluorescent wiring contort at the back, and a stream of runway models strut across the front, clad in an array of alien-looking garments. In one of the most surreal sights in metal history, Norwegian black metal band Satyricon douse this display in evil with the venomous sound of their diabolical hymn, K.I.N.G. How the fuck did we get here?
“It was bizarre!” frontman Satyr remembers today. “The production was done by NRK, which is Norway’s equivalent to the BBC, 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?’
Obviously in a winter country like Norway these events are deeply rooted in our sporting culture, and I guess they wanted to take it and combine it with something else that is uniquely Norwegian and show it to the world. I have no idea who came up with the idea to blend it with a fashion show!”
To understand the song that got them there, we have to back up a few years. For the first decade of their existence, the band consisting primarily of Satyr and drummer Frost had been one of the Norwegian scene’s great chameleonic innovators.
Up until the Pantera tour, black metal was perceived as a crazy thing with churches burning and people getting killed… Eventually all of that would go away
Satyr
From the medieval Scandinavian folk influences of their 1993 debut album Dark Medieval Times and the following year’s The Shadowthrone, to the widescreen apocalyptic visions of 1996’s Nemesis Divina, to the sudden stark shift into grinding industrialised grimness on 1999’s Rebel Extravaganza, Satyricon had gained a reputation for the radical. Metal’s mainstream was starting to notice them.
“The change for us was the Pantera tour in April/May 2000,” considers Satyr. “The way it felt to me was, up until that point, any black metal band was perceived as a crazy thing with churches burning and people getting killed… Eventually all of that would go away. When we appeared on the billing of that tour and we were playing Brixton Academy, not looking intimidated by the size of the stage, I felt that was the first time that the media started to see that bands from this scene were still here.”
Satyricon grabbed this opportunity by the horns, in their own rebellious style. On 2002’s Volcano and particularly 2006’s Now, Diabolical, from which K.I.N.G. is taken, Satyricon hewed out a sound that would make them one of the biggest black metal bands of the era. While bands such as Cradle Of Filth and Dimmu Borgir were achieving massive success by embracing symphonic bombast and studio gloss, Satyricon stripped everything back, relying on a rock-solid rhythmic backbone and production that’s remarkably dry.
Often called ‘black’n’roll’ – although Satyr makes it clear that he despises that particular term, reasonably pointing out that the likes of Venom, Bathory and Celtic Frost in their earliest forms would be called that by today’s standards – this was a dramatic reconnection with the outlaw rock’n’roll roots from which black metal was initially spewed.
“The late 90s were a difficult time, because keyboards in black metal stopped appearing as complementary and became very dominant,” Satyr explains. “For me, it felt like the wrong interpretation of this music. This type of music is riff-driven. I always said that there was an element of protest on Rebel Extravaganza by making something more misanthropic and with aesthetics that were very different to the pompous theatrical imagery that was popular around then.
“Now, Diabolical was trusting more that a song could be more powerful if we strip it of unnecessary elements,” he continues. “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.”
K.I.N.G. is Satyricon’s ultimate exercise in this primordial mastery of fundamentals. Frost, one of black metal’s most capably infernal blasters lays down an immutably disciplined backbeat, while that riff that Satyr lovingly calls his “song-carrier” pounds with a greasy blackened AC/DC-like insistence. It is the rare genuine black metal floor-filler, a song as malevolent as it is easy to get down to (as those dancers at the fashion show would demonstrate). They even got longtime AC/DC engineer Mike Fraser to mix it.
“He got us the rates to go to Bryan Adams’ Warehouse Studio in Vancouver with the best analogue gear, like nothing we’d seen before,” recalls Satyr fondly. “[Mike] knew very little about black metal, but I wanted someone who does that simplicity with really good sound, and he was doing all kinds of crazy shit. If you listen to Now, Diabolical in 2026 it sounds really good to this day.”
Slithering atop this robust groove is Satyr’s own vocal, not budging an inch from a black metal growl but punchily hitting each bark on the beat with curt enunciation as he describes the physical characteristics of this great demonic monarch, feasibly making it black metal’s answer to Big Fish Little Fish Cardboard Box.
If we’d had Slipknot’s budget we probably would have gone back to Roadrunner and said it was not the right video
Satyr
Along with the proclamations across the album of burning pentagrams and the coming of the Dark Lord, the sense is of some great dark epoch being ushered in, Satyricon laying out the red carpet for this Satanic sovereign preparing to rule the Earth.
“I was very drawn to and fascinated by secret societies and occult lodges, Freemasonry, and this esoteric world,” Satyr explains of his fixations during the making of the album. “Some of the photos we took for the album were in the old auditorium of the original University of Oslo, where that Ski Championships ceremony would actually end up taking place, because it has this grand hall, Masonic vibe.
I was reading that almost all rulers of the Earth have been following some sort of religion or have been a member of some sort of cult or secret society, and that’s where the real power lies. That transcends national barriers, cultural barriers, and moments in time. That idea helped shape the lyrics and also the visual design of that record.”
These grand ideas of occult philosophy and covert power might not have translated so clearly to the music video for K.I.N.G., however. Born during an unlikely sweet spot between black metal bands dealing with strictly underground resource pools in the 1990s, and music videos becoming a less financially supported art form in the 2010s and 20s, Satyricon racked up a stream of shockingly high-budget MTV clips for songs such as 2002’s Fuel For Hatred and Now, Diabolical’s other single, The Pentagram Burns.
But the K.I.N.G. video, where the band find themselves in the midst of some strange, demonic, drug-fuelled party surrounded by grasping revellers in carnivalistic dress is one Satyr feels less connected to today.
“I felt it was a bit pretentious!” he laughs sheepishly. “Why on Earth are we having a scene here where someone is trying to push Frost down the stairs? What is that about? The director had very set ideas about how he wanted it to be, and it was difficult for us to fully understand how he saw it. We’d be doing scenes asking, ‘You’re sure about this?’
"The Pentagram Burns [featuring fire and dancers] was completely different, and that was exactly the right representation of the album to me. With K.I.N.G., if we’d had Slipknot’s budget we probably would have gone back to Roadrunner and said it was not the right video for the song. But we were not Slipknot, we were Satyricon.”
Regardless of aesthetic mismatch, it’s a vivid time capsule of this moment where Satyricon, playing a dangerous and even sexy kind of extreme metal, were able to rub shoulders with the mainstream. A challenging but defining moment came two months after the album’s release, at 2006’s Download festival, where Satyricon found themselves opening the main stage on a day topped by the biggest metal band of all, Metallica.
“We made it late to the stage, due to some incompetent crew I immediately fired after that show, but it showed the best parts of Satyricon, because for the few songs we now had time to play, we made sure to absolutely own that stage,” he recalls.
“I remember walking out and looking at that sea of 80,000 people, and this enormous runway that was on the main stage. I thought to myself that the first thing I needed to do, to show that we were not just there to get the day started, was to walk on that runway. We’re not saying, ‘That catwalk is for Metallica later tonight!’ – we’re gonna go out and own it. I think that in Satyricon our greatest quality is when it’s something of particularly big importance, a particularly big occasion, that’s where we excel – so let’s go out there and show them.”
Satyricon play Damnation Festival on Sunday November 8.
