Scorpio: For people who don't know you, who are you?
Otheyn Vermithrax: I handle vocals, guitar, keyboards and drums for STORMKEEP.
This is your second album as STORMKEEP. What's the response been like so far?
So far the response has been very positive. We've had a lot of traction, a lot of people interested in the band since the last album as well. Most of it's positive. I know some people maybe weren't as excited about the different direction we took, but for us that's just an important part of the journey. Whenever you're working on something new, you always know you can't please everybody. That's just how the world works.
The Nocturnes of Iswylm — the Dragon Queen, the Seer and the Dragon, painted by Simon Bisley.
What changed? I noticed less dungeon synth, fewer dungeon synth intros, and more clean vocals.
That was a very specific thing we did on purpose, to take away a lot of the in-betweens of the dungeon synth. We wanted to move away from some of the older keyboard sounds, like Casio sounds and MIDI tracks that sound more like early-'90s fantasy ambient, Mortiis or Kirkwood or that type of thing, and go in a more dramatic, darker direction with real symphonic sounds. To do that we built from the ground up. It was a conscious effort after a number of years of figuring out where that direction would go.
The first track on the record, "The Taste of Immortal Blood," was the first song I wrote for the album, and it was the first one that felt like: okay, this is the new direction. It felt like the template for the sonic palette we were going to use, and everything else developed from there. Using clean vocals more was somewhat conscious, but I've also said every song asks for what it gets. You listen for that, and a lot of times it's guitar riffs first, then everything else builds from there.
Taking on the clean vocals myself was a new thing for me too, and a real challenge doing it for a whole record. I'd always done the harsh vocals, but Shield Anvil, also known as Jake Rogers from GALLOWBRAID, CALADAN BROOD and VISIGOTH, had always handled that role on the last couple of releases. He wasn't on this record, mostly because it felt right for me to tackle it myself. A lot of the lyrics felt like it would be odd for someone else to sing them, and a more gothic influence felt like it suited my timbre better. A lot of it happened naturally, tied to the storyline and where the last record left off.
All your albums are conceptual, set in the world of Elda. Do you have the whole story mapped out across multiple albums, or does it develop with each one?
Usually I have an overarching idea of where the story is going, but the details take form as we get into each record. Tales of Othertime, for example, was written musically first, and the storyline came about afterward. Since that story already existed in the world, even going back to Galdrum, it made more sense this time to work out the story ideas before going into the music.
After finishing Tales of Othertime, I was writing a lot of material in a very similar style, and it just felt like it wasn't moving the needle. Like a rehash, "Tales of Othertime Part 2." So it felt important to start from a clean slate: figure out where we are in the story first, then build from there. Going into this record, the Seer is in dire straits because the Dragon Queen has now awakened. He's cursed by the Serpent Stone and has to consume human essence and human souls, and he's grappling with that throughout the whole album. From there it made sense to give each song its own story structure.
The cover shows the Dragon Queen, the Seer and the Dragon. You worked with a well-known British comic artist on it. How did that collaboration come about?
If people know Simon Bisley, it's probably from Heavy Metal Magazine or covers he's done for bands like DANZIG. His style felt very in line with what we were doing and the new direction the album was going: a much darker palette, over the top, rooted in comics. But he's also a metalhead and a musician himself, so he really understands the vibe we were going for.
Simon Bisley — Heavy Metal Magazine, Lobo, sleeves for DANZIG — took the job after a cold email. Photo by Chloe Maveal.
I just cold-emailed him, described what the album was about and the overall picture. I had a pretty basic idea of what I wanted, gave him a reference of Frank Frazetta's The Sea Witch (he's a huge Frazetta fan himself), and gave him the details of who the Dragon Queen is and the rest of it. He did some sketches, sent me the painting, and we went back and forth making it a bit darker in tone. Overall he really captured the essence of what the album was doing, and the world of Elda coming to life in an illustration. That's all you can really hope for when you commission something.
Funny story: I have a separate personal channel where I post vinyl reels, and I recently posted yours. YouTube flagged it as adult content.
[laughs] Yeah, of course. Because of the... you know. [chuckles]
Growing up in Europe and then moving to the US, hearing about censorship here always struck me as absurd. European museums are full of nude antique statues, completely normal. I wore a DIMMU BORGIR Puritanical Euphoric Misanthropia shirt to university and it was fine. Here, US releases get a different, toned-down cover. What's your take on that kind of censorship?
[chuckles] It goes back to the Puritanical beginnings of America, the early idea that women should cover up, in a very Christian sense. The people who left Europe for America carried very Puritanical views about the human body, and that view of sex never really left. You see it today: America has the highest rates of porn addiction and some genuinely strange attitudes toward sex and toward women. To me that's a byproduct of that same Puritanism. Funny to say in the context of DIMMU BORGIR, but that's really what we're talking about.
To me it's just art. If anyone asks, the Dragon Queen is a powerful figure. It's not about sexualizing her. Sure, it's over the top and she's very well endowed, but she's not in a submissive position, it's not demeaning. To me it's more about the force of nature of dark feminine energy, which I think is genuinely terrifying to a lot of men, many of whom can't understand it and want to control women instead: tell them what to wear, how to live.
I've been to Europe maybe twenty times, and it's always struck me how normal it is there for women to go topless at a river, or on a nudist beach. There's some of that in the States too, but the attitude is completely different. In America nudity reads as sexual first; in Europe it's "that's just anatomy" until something actually sexual happens. I've heard from people who couldn't show the cover on their platform, and obviously we knew that would be part of the conversation in America, but to me it just felt like a natural choice. Tits on a metal album cover isn't exactly a wild concept. [chuckles]
Same as the works of Ancient Greece, right?
Absolutely.
Sticking with aesthetics: a lot of black metal bands today have dropped corpse paint, spikes and leather. Your press photos have you in the snow in Colorado in shoulder pads with spikes, giving off real EMPEROR vibes, and the music leans into that '90s symphonic EMPEROR/DIMMU BORGIR sound. What made you consciously carry that era forward?
STORMKEEP exists because of those bands from the '90s. That's the music that got me into extreme metal in the first place, when I was 14, twenty-three years ago. That's what pushed me into playing music, picking up drums and guitar, and then going down the rabbit hole of Norwegian and Greek black metal, the first wave and everything around it. But it started with the symphonic stuff, and that's always held an important place in my musical journey.
It's also a style that became pretty passé at a certain point. Overblown in the 2000s, too many bands doing it not particularly well, some of the classic bands broke up or fell off, and the style basically went dead for fifteen or twenty years. From our very first material, the idea for STORMKEEP was always to play keyboard black metal. There's an era of it that's genuinely great, and we wanted to carry that flame as if it never died. That said, we always want to inject something new into it. Especially on Tales of Othertime and this new record, we've consciously brought in other influences: some of that Greek sound, some power metal, some gothic elements, and made it into something that's its own culmination of different styles of black metal.
Tales of Othertime (2021) — written music first, with the story following after. Cover painting by Les Edwards.
I'm also a big '90s symphonic black metal fan, and this year it's been great to hear your album alongside WORM's Necropalace. Both scratch that same itch. What's your take on this North American symphonic black metal revival, given the sound originated in Norway?
I don't want to disparage other bands, but when STORMKEEP started doing what we're doing, nobody else was really doing it, aside from the original bands. It felt like a real gap. Symphonic black metal had basically been dead for a while, and that's why STORMKEEP started, to address that. So it's genuinely cool that other bands are getting into it too. It expands the palette, grows the genre, and hopefully moves past some of the hurdles it ran into in the 2000s, where a lot of bands went more symphonic and less metal and lost the plot a bit.
If people can continue that in a conscious, deliberate way that's true to what genuinely pulls them, that's a great thing. It's interesting that it's happening in North America specifically. That sound made a huge impact on a lot of us growing up here, even though the European sound of that era resonated in a way that hasn't quite been replicated since. I think a lot of us are just pulling from that again and realizing the stuff everyone decided wasn't cool anymore is actually really good. It's great to see bands like OLD MAN'S CHILD back together and playing shows again. Their first show back was at Fire in the Mountains last year, one of their first shows in North America in a long time. You can tell the hunger for that sound is definitely here.
What's your take on the latest DIMMU BORGIR album?
Honestly, I haven't really heard it, just a snippet of one song. I'll admit I fell off DIMMU BORGIR even after Death Cult Armageddon. In Sorte Diaboli was decent but not as big a jump as the previous records, and after that it felt like it decreased in quality pretty consistently. I haven't heard Ionian either, if I'm honest. But for me, the run from For All Tid to Death Cult Armageddon is just, every album is good. That's hard to beat. It's hard for any band to keep up that level of longevity.
It's wild that EMPEROR only released four albums, but they're still touring and headlining major festivals every year.
Yeah, I think that's so respectable. A lot of people assume they're just doing it for the paycheck, but they do it because they genuinely love playing those songs. Ihsahn has his solo career, Samoth has The Wretched End and other projects, and I'm a big fan of ZYKLON too, even though that's been dormant for a while. Everyone's had their own things going on.
It's honestly admirable to put out four records and say, "There's nothing more we can do together that would top what we already did." A lot of people are down on Prometheus, but I actually really like that record, though you can already sense the creative output starting to dissipate a bit, which is wild considering they were in their mid-twenties when they made it. Four of the greatest metal albums of all time, in my opinion, before they hit their mid-twenties. That's an absurdly high bar to clear if you're going to try anything else in that space. So for me it's just: keep playing the material. I got to tour with them and see them play live with that same lineup, the guys who actually made those records performing them. You get to hear parts you might not even catch on the record. It's a genuinely great experience.
You're involved in multiple bands and projects. How does that work time-wise, and creatively, so ideas don't bleed from one band into another?
It's always a battle over time and where to put it. Right now BLOOD INCANTATION is my main touring band, so that's where I spend most of my time on the road. But we still work creatively across all the other projects. For me, writing and releasing records is the number one thing I want to do; that's my favorite part of making music. Playing shows is great too, and BLOOD INCANTATION gets to do a lot of really cool shows, which is a huge part of my life as well. But not every band needs that, and that's how we've figured out the balance: STORMKEEP is never going to tour like BLOOD INCANTATION does, and that's fine.
That actually makes more sense given the kind of black metal we're making. It needs to be a special event, in the right kind of place. It can't just be your average bar with a Coors Light sign behind you, that would ruin the vibe. BLOOD INCANTATION, on the other hand, we ground out on the road for years. Every project has its own lane. It's actually great that the three of us in STORMKEEP are also in WAYFARER, so we're balancing those together too, but the three of us understand each other really well and have been playing music together for so long that it's easy.
You released this album on Vesperian, and I think WAYFARER is on the same label, right?
Yeah, WAYFARER's joined too, and we've also got Denver labelmates in DREADNOUGHT, a lot of really great bands already on board.
How did the relationship with the label come about?
Vesperian is a new label started by Philipp Schulte, who spent many years at Century Media as vice CEO. He's actually the one who originally signed BLOOD INCANTATION and WAYFARER to Century Media. He's always been genuinely interested in the same kind of stuff we're doing, very knowledgeable, and a real fan of the music first, which is a huge thing. You don't find that too often in this industry. It's not about money for him, it's about the love of the music.
So when he wanted to start a new label, it made sense. We were already talking about STORMKEEP moving on from Ván Records, and he brought WAYFARER with him from Century Media too. It felt very natural. I've known him since 2019, and it's been a great relationship. He gives us complete creative freedom, which is amazing, and he genuinely believes in what we're doing. Every time we bring him ideas, he's a hundred percent in. It's a great place to be.
You've mentioned touring isn't going to be a huge focus for STORMKEEP. What are the current plans? Any chance of seeing you in Santa Cruz, California, where I live?
We'll see. I'm not sure exactly how things will roll out, but we're looking toward 2027 for some performances. Right now we're just happy to finally have the record out after working on it for the last two years. Glad people can finally hear it, and someday we'd love to play it live.
STORMKEEP in the Colorado snow — spikes, corpse paint and shoulder pads, carrying the '90s flame forward.
You mentioned the venue needs to be special, not a bar with a Coors Light sign. What's your dream venue? Is Red Rocks, in your home state, one of them?
Oh, absolutely, I'd love to play Red Rocks someday. That's definitely on the list, and I think it's realistic in some way. I've played incredible venues with BLOOD INCANTATION, but with STORMKEEP we played Beyond the Gates in Norway three years ago. Great festival for us, and playing in Norway with a band like this is an incredible opportunity, basically going to the homeland of the stuff we're interested in. Beyond that, it's really about performing in decent theaters and nice places that take people out of the everyday world and let them step into the world of Elda with us.
It was always funny to me, as a student back in Ukraine, watching DIMMU BORGIR perform at the Grammys in the '90s. Everyone in tuxedos and cocktail dresses, very formal, and then these guys in corpse paint come out and just [growls].
[chuckles] It's incredible that black metal is basically one of Norway's major exports at this point.
When I was in Norway last year I visited the music museum in Trondheim, Rockheim. You can blast music through half the museum, pick any band on a big screen. I stood there playing DIMMU BORGIR, ENSLAVED, EMPEROR. For them it's just part of the culture, not some underground niche thing.
Absolutely. It's amazing how integrated it is into everyday life there, whereas in the United States it's not like that at all. [chuckles]
It's not exactly country music. [chuckles]
No, exactly. It's just not part of the culture here.
Thanks so much for your time today. Any farewell words for your fans?
Just thank you for listening. If we've touched on something that resonates with people, we're happy that it exists and that we can make that connection, and hopefully we'll see some of you out on the road someday.
The Nocturnes of Iswylm is out now via Vesperian. Cover art by Simon Bisley, additional artwork by Valnoir; produced by the band with Michael Zech and mastered by Arthur Rizk.
Thanks to Liz Ciavarella-Brenner at Earsplit PR for arranging this interview.
Follow STORMKEEP:
Instagram: instagram.com/stormkeepofficial
Bandcamp: stormkeep-odl.bandcamp.com
Spotify: open.spotify.com/artist/1qBAMIG8efDyEUGA9axXHD
Label: vesperian.world