Caine Blackthorn
In this interview with Green Carnation (Season of Mist) the band shows they aren’t just survivors, they’re craftsmen of their own mythology. Few bands could weave decades of change into one lineage of sound without losing the pulse. From the monolithic Light of Day, Day of Darkness to the reflective terrain of The Shores of Melancholia, they’ve never chased trends, they’ve sculpted moods.
“Before stepping into the heart of this conversation, catch up on how A Dark Poem reshaped Green Carnation’s story. Our full promo dives into the mythology behind the trilogy.”
In our conversation with Green Carnation we spoke with vocalist Kjetil Nordhus about legacy, creative evolution, and how this ambitious trilogy reflects the beating heart of Green Carnation.
Check out our album review for A Dark Poem Part 1: The Shores of Melancholia where our own Kevin McSweeney dives deep into the music. It’s worth pausing to recognize what makes Green Carnation special: their endurance, their evolution, and that rare ability to make heaviness feel human.
→ Read our full review of A Dark Poem, Pt. I – The Shores of Melancholia here.
The Interview
Back Catalogue & History
Metal Lair: “Light of Day, Day of Darkness” gets remembered for its length; I’m more interested in the motivic DNA inside it. Do you hear it now as one organism or a chain of micro-movements stitched together?
Kjetil Nordhus: I do hear it as one organism, although I remember how it was composed and put together, so I can accept people hearing it as different movements stitched together too. The idea behind making it a one-track song was to encourage the listener to hear it from start to finish to help get the full story and in order to understand the record.
Metal Lair: On “The Quiet Offspring” you pivoted to tighter, riff-driven forms. Was that fatigue with writing leviathans, or a deliberate constraint to discover a different voice?
Kjetil Nordhus: It was most definitely not fatigue, but we did struggle a little with figuring out what to do after Light of Day, Day of Darkness. It was a hard album to follow up. So we went for followingour stomach feeling at the time, resulting in A Blessing in Disguise, and continued that for the next few albums.
Metal Lair: “Acoustic Verses” showed another side entirely. Acoustic records can sometimes feel like afterthoughts, but yours had its own atmosphere, almost ghostly. How did you approach making an acoustic record feel like a “real” Green Carnation statement instead of just unplugging?
Kjetil Nordhus: It did feel like a real Green Carnation statement at the time. All the songs were written for the purpose of that album, and it wasn’t really something completely new for the band members, but for the band. Many people have said that the atmosphere in the Acoustic Verses album is the closest one to Light of Day, Day of Darkness, although the sound is very different. I can understand that. And for me it is also a proof that the acoustic side of us indeed is a part of Green Carnation.
Metal Lair: Leaves of Yesteryear felt like a bridge between your past selves and this trilogy. When you recorded that, did you already sense A Dark Poem coming, or was that realization born later?
Kjetil Nordhus: Yes, we had already started writing A Dark Poem at the time. We were working on this huge, long-term project, but for a period of course we needed to focus fully on Leaves of Yesteryear. You are right, before the writing process started for that album, we did talk quite a lot about what we wanted to do. And I think you can both hear it and understand it when seeing the song choices that we had a half eye to our past while it being very important for us to redefine our sound after so many years.
Metal Lair: Looking back, which past record do you think has aged the best and which one feels like it belongs to a different lifetime entirely?
Kjetil Nordhus: I do not feel that any of them belongs to a different lifetime, really. Maybe it is because we have kept elements from all our previous albums in the way we are doing things now, and which is a very important part of our sound in 2025.
The New Trilogy – A Dark Poem
Metal Lair: Part I – “The Shores of Melancholia” moves like tide and undertow. Was that oceanic pulse a conscious compositional device or something that emerged in the room?
Kjetil Nordhus: What a poetic question! What I can say is that after composing all the songs to all the three albums, we had three more compositions to make, and that were the albums. We have wanted She Shores of Melancholia to be an album that can stand alone, but also work as part one in a trilogy. So when we put together the songs for this album, we needed to put together songs that would work well together, and for the songs to contribute to it being a complete album on its own. Maybe we succeeded with that.
Metal Lair: You’ve always prioritized emotional architecture over complexity for its own sake. How do you police that line in arranging what passes the “heart first” test?
Kjetil Nordhus: I would say we do not think too much about that, that is just how we make music these days. Emotions have always been way more important for us over technical brilliance for the sake of it. And the complexity is nothing we are trying to just for the songs to be complex, it is just the way the songs have to be for us to be able to tell what we want during the songs.
Metal Lair: What role do limitations play in your writing process? Do you ever intentionally box yourselves in with tempo restrictions, harmonic rules or track length caps to spark creativity?
Kjetil Nordhus: No limitations whatsoever. And what we have been even more aware of this time around, is to have the songs decide what direction to evolve in the composing process, and that we would’t stop that before the song’s potential was fulfilled. One example is The Slave That You Are, that got more and more heavy during the writing process, and in the end we had to add harsh vocals to the verses because the song really needed that.
Metal Lair: The trilogy’s sonics feel warm, dense, lived-in, less clinical than some modern prog. What production decisions (rooms, mics, saturation, mix philosophy) got you there?
Kjetil Nordhus: I am honestly not the right person to answer this question. But, this is one of many important reasons why we chose doing this in DUB Studio. With Endre Kirkesola, we knew what we were going to get, he is truly one of the most gifted sound wizards in the business. And I am extremely happy with how The Shores of Melancholia sounds.
Metal Lair: Without spoiling parts II & III: which lyrical or musical motifs seeded in Part I will resurface and how should listeners be listening for them?
Kjetil Nordhus: I won’t spoil too much, no. I can say that the lyrical themes remain the same throughout the trilogy, but the small thing I can spoil is that you will hear elements from Part I later on in the trilogy.
Metal Lair: You re-centered “My Dark Reflections of Life and Death” in 2020. Do threads from that re-recording feed into A Dark Poem both melodically and thematically, or in worldview?
Kjetil Nordhus: I think revisiting that song was an important factor in bringing the former and current Green Carnation together. And, although we are basically the same people in the band today as we were in the very beginning of the 2000s, I think the awareness of our history in combination with a huge desire to create something new are extremely important factors for us today.
Live process — narrative & places
Metal Lair: Your sets feel architected, not just sequenced. How do you design a show that travels from the hour-long monolith to compact material and now into the trilogy’s arc?
Kjetil Nordhus: We learned a lot after doing Light of Day, Day of Darkness in our comeback year in 2016, we learned a lot. When inviting the live audience into something at the first tone and not letting them go for 60 minutes made them extremely emotionally involved. When trying to do a live set with the shorter songs the years after we didn’t feel that we had the same connection, somehow. So, after that we have been trying to make our live set intense, with no real pauses, and we will be doing that in the future too.
Metal Lair: When playing live, do you treat your long songs like journeys with fixed destinations, or do you let the night and the crowd reshape how you travel through them?
Kjetil Nordhus: Just like the last answer, I think we are trying to make the whole live set an experience that is one experience, not five or ten (depending on the number of songs we play).
Playful cuts — gear, covers, closer
Metal Lair: You once staged that unforgettable concert at the dam. A performance space most bands would never even imagine. If you could stage a show in another “impossible” location, where would it be?
Kjetil Nordhus: Oooooh. We have been talking about doing shows on the pyramids in Egypt and other places. And I see that Wardruna just did a show in the amfi theatre in Pompeii, and that would be amazing. I am not sure if I have a good answer here, but Green Carnation have never been shy of doing something extraordinary, so who knows?
Metal Lair: If you had to cover one non-metal song live way out of left field, what would each of you pick, and why?
Kjetil Nordhus: We have been doing that through our career. I think our version of Time in a Bottle by Jim Croce and our live version of Nights in White Satin by The Moody Blues are songs that might not be the obvious cover songs by a band like us.
Metal Lair: What’s one question you wish interviewers would stop asking and what question has no one dared to ask you yet?
Kjetil Nordhus: I am not sure. I think the questions in this interview have been really good, and quite different. There are generally a lot of questions that are very much the same.
Metal Lair: Every band has cursed gear. What’s the one piece of equipment that has betrayed you the most on stage or in the studio?
Kjetil Nordhus: Haha. We don’t have any. Yet..
Metal Lair: Finish this sentence — “Green Carnation will never… but we might just…”
Kjetil Nordhus: Green Carnation will never let anyone outside of the band decide anything we will do but we might just reconsider that if we cooperate with an artist who share the same view as us.
Metal Lair: Let’s say a future archaeologist digs up a Green Carnation vinyl in the year 3025. Which track would you want them to needle-drop first?
Kjetil Nordhus: Oh.. haha. Right now I would say the opening track on The Shores of Melancholia, As Silence Took You.
MetalLair:
“Kjetil, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with us. It’s been an honor and a privilege to have this conversation, and I know our readers will be as inspired by your words as I’ve been. We wish Green Carnation all the best with A Dark Poem and beyond.”
Kjetil Nordhus: Thank you for a very interesting interview for me to answer. Thank you for your support.
Read our album review for Carach Angrens new album The Cult of Kariba here.
In this interview with Green Carnation talking with Kjetil Nordhus reminded me why I still believe in long-form interviews. He’s sharp without ego, patient with every question, and quietly passionate about the craft. You can tell during our conversation with the band that Green Carnation’s endurance comes from that balance of curiosity wrapped in thoughtfulness. Every word shows why Green Carnation continue to resonate.
Our chat about A Dark Poem reveals this isn’t just a new album; it’s the next breath in a living story. And if this first chapter is any indication, that story is far from over.
The pit doesn’t end here.
If this interview lit a spark, there’s plenty more waiting in the lair:
Deep Cuts – Where forgotten riffs rise from the crypt. We dig past the surface to bring you metal’s most overlooked treasures. Seven Deadly Songs – Our weekly playlist of essential new tracks, hotter than hell and twice as loud. Metalhead Horoscope – Your cosmic forecast, rewritten in the language of leather and distortion, complete with a lucky track to soundtrack your week.
World Metal Weekly – A global passport through the underground, one country at a time.
Track Listing:
1. As Silence Took You
2. In Your Paradise
3. Me My Enemy
4. The Slave That You Are (Featuring Grutle Kjellson of Enslaved)
5. The Shores of Melancholia
6. Too Close to the Flame
Follow Green Carnation
Bandcamp: https://greencarnationsom.bandcamp.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/GreenCarnationNorway
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/green2carnation/
Twitter (X): https://x.com/Green2Carnation
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC2vfEaTADayEniT7xbG-XCA
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/artist/1ZaJhNBAhJ3HjPsWiB9sDc
Apple Music: https://music.apple.com/artist/green-carnation/72866964
Deezer: https://www.deezer.com/artist/8192
Tidal: https://tidal.com/browse/artist/23079
