Ihsahn Doesn’t Think There Needs to be a New Emperor Album
We’ve all seen the movie before: legacy band decides to come out of retirement or a long hiatus with a comeback record for the ages, only for it to end up rarely hitting as hard as the original stuff. As a result, fans are either left making excuses for a so-so new record or people bounce off it entirely.
And while that may be how things go, it’s not how Emperor will do things if frontman Ihsahn has anything to say about it. During a recent interview with El Planeta Del Rock, he reiterated his stance that it’s likely not worthwhile for the Norwegian black metal band to release a new album.
“…If I had a dime, as they say, for every time people ask me, ‘Will there be another Emperor album?’ In the beginning, it felt maybe a bit annoying, but I’ve chosen to see it more as—of course, in there, in that kind of question, there’s a compliment that people, like myself, who have a relationship to music from their youth or something that you’re attached to, obviously it was important for someone, which is a great thing. And the question for another album is that they want to feel that again, they want to feel more of that, which is also great. But then, in practical terms, what kind of Emperor album could we make that would satisfy that desire?
“I think it would be easy-ish to make something that sounds like early Emperor, but who would want a black metal album made to make money off some kind of conceptual idea for some kind of demand in the market? That goes against everything that the music is about, in some sense. And if the other way would—I mean, we ended up in a place where I wrote more and more of the music, and with the last Emperor album, I did everything. And then, if we followed that trajectory, it’s very close to how I make my music today [as a solo artist]. And I don’t think that’s what people mean. So, do you want this kind of metal? This is kind of what I do already. If you want me to try to go backwards and try to be a teenager again and unlearn any experience I’ve had as a musician and us going to back and trying to be…”
If you’ve been following Emperor and Ihsahn for a while now, you know that everything he’s saying is pretty much par for the course for a while now. Just this past September, Ihsahn suggested that Emperor “came to a very natural conclusion.”
As such, Ihsahn said such a comeback “is quite impossible.” And while he and guitarist Samoth could work together in the future, he said that’s unlikely in the context of a new Emperor album.
“You see how this is quite impossible. So unless planets align in the ways that me and [Emperor guitarist] Samoth just really connect over a common idea that we really want to make, I really don’t see that happening. And also, then again, name me one band who broke up and then did a reunion record where people were, like, ‘Fuck. This is amazing. This is even better than the old stuff.’ It doesn’t really happen because it’s impossible because you can’t compete with nostalgia. And also it’s a risk because I would say that the culture and the atmosphere in the band and the traveling crew that we have with Emperor is probably better than it’s been ever. And we have such a great time doing what we do. We love playing the old songs. It’s not like we go, ‘Ah, these old songs.’ It’s not maybe always that fun to rehearse ‘I Am The Black Wizards,’ but performing ‘I Am The Black Wizards’ live is never boring. And we really make sure we enjoy it and really put ourselves out there a hundred percent.
“I don’t really see any reason to kind of tilt and risk destroying that for what could possibly be reasons that are not compatible with the uncompromising nature of what Emperor was. And hopefully the tradition that uncompromising attitude probably was what got us here in the first place.”
It’s a bummer that we can’t expect new music, but hey, at least he’s honest—and who doesn’t love the classic Emperor discography?
