Emperor - We Are the Sorcerers

From the never ending mountains black, to the bottomless lakes

I am the ruler and has been for eternities long

My wizards are many, but their essence is mine

Forever they are in the hills in their stone homes of grief

Because I am the spirit of their existence

I am them

One of the most original acts in Norwegian black metal, Emperor have left their mark on the genre's history with a discography of just four studio albums, flanked by a handful of EPs, compilations and other minor releases. What's more, their career has been anything but continuous: formed in 1991, they kept going through various difficulties for a decade, before the split of 2001 put the project on ice; the reunions of 2005-2007, 2013-2014, 2016 and 2024 have been met with enthusiasm by black-metal fans, without however producing new material capable of adding anything substantially relevant to their discography.

Their main legacy is a sound that fuses the ferocious with the cathartic and the symphonic, drawing on fantasy inspirations alongside a fascination with European legend and folklore. Compared to the other key figures of Norwegian black metal, with whom there's no shortage of common ground and cross-references, Emperor pursued a trajectory with a strong affinity for the ideas of prog rock and symphonic/progressive metal. Their attention to composition goes hand in hand with a pursuit of sonic power, while the songs blend the esoteric and the satanic with the fantastical and the visionary.

While the pioneers of the black metal second wave Mayhem, after the seminal "De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas" (1994), would fail to manage a follow-up album within the Nineties, partly due to numerous legal troubles and lineup instability, and other major figures such as Immortal and Darkthrone would use their early albums to cement an imagery destined to become the reference point for most of the black metal to come, Emperor instead developed, across four albums, a sound that kept changing each time, whose natural conclusion would potentially have been a move away from Norwegian black metal and its stylistic tropes toward a symphonically tinged prog-metal.

In doing so, they were among the first to demonstrate just how fertile a ground black metal could be for even ambitious cross-pollination, well beyond its initial foundations of extreme satanism, iconoclasm and ferocity. Their blend of the bestial and the refined, an apparent compositional oxymoron, proved a fundamental springboard for the careers of England's Cradle Of Filth and fellow Norwegians Dimmu Borgir, both destined to become symphonic-black-metal celebrities by the end of the century, but it's also the premise behind the adventurous post-metal and post-black explorations of acts such as Wolves In The Throne Room.

The emperor's wrath: origins, early releases, the black metal inner circle

Vegard Sverre Tveitan, born in Notodden in 1975, meets Tomas Thormodsæter Haugen, born in Hammerfest in 1974, at the age of 13. In 1990 they play together in a death-metal band renamed several times: Dark Device, Xerasia, Embryonic and finally Thou Shalt Suffer. Vegard Sverre Tveitan has played piano and guitar since childhood, so it seems natural to bring keyboards into the band's arrangements too. Tveitan splits guitar duties with Haugen; bass and drums are handled, respectively, by cult figure Vidar Våer, better known by the name of his musical project Ildjarn, and by Thorbjørn Akkerhaugen, though at various points both instruments are played by Haugen. For their musical careers, the two friends adopt stage names: Tveitan will go down in metal history as Ihsahn, Haugen as Samoth.

Into The Woods Of Belial (1990) and Open The Mysteries Of Your Creation (1990) are two demos that capture the band's idea of extreme metal at the time, an extremely violent black-death metal with measured touches of menacing keyboards, guitar work that's ambitious if still raw, and a compositional style favoring songs split into sections, frequent tempo changes, and a vocal style that only occasionally shifts from growl to a fierce scream. The influence of Celtic Frost and Bathory is evident but, allowing for the amateurish nature of it all, these are interesting tracks for tracing the starting point of the future Emperor.

Samoth begins writing music not intended for Thou Shalt Suffer, and the band soon dissolves. Ihsahn, surprisingly, will resurrect the project to release the only official album under its name, Somnium (2000), dominated by a gloomy neoclassical vein and almost entirely instrumental: nothing of the original black-death sound remains, save for the fascination with darkness. While Burzum's dark-ambient, atmospheric turn startled metalheads, Ihsahn's proves far more predictable, given his background and, above all, what he would go on to deliver in terms of orchestral arrangements with Emperor itself. Across the ten compositions, entirely the work of Ihsahn, we find moments that make explicit the connection with what we'll shortly recount about the main band's discography.

In 1991, Samoth and Ihsahn form Emperor, defined by a sound that moves away from death metal to explore black metal in greater depth. Keyboards become a structural element. Also encouraging them in this early phase is Øystein “Euronymous” Aarseth, founding member of Mayhem, owner of the “Helvete” record shop, founder of the Deathlike Silence label, and a central figure in the development of Norwegian metal. Euronymous also heads the so-called “black metal inner circle,” more a gathering of people than a genuine cult, which meets at the premises and in the basement of “Helvete.” In general, its members share views that often align with an idea of militant, provocative and deeply over-the-top satanism. As often happens, someone turns out to be motivated enough to want to move from words to deeds.

The detailed story of the world surrounding “Helvete” and the “black metal inner circle” is magnificently told in the book “Lord Of Chaos,” while here we'll limit ourselves to a brief mention of what most concerns Emperor.

In May 1992 the newly formed band releases the demo Wrath Of The Tyrant, with Håvard “Mortiis” Ellefsen on bass, Ihsahn (credited here as Ygg) handling guitar, vocals and keyboards, and Samoth (here as Samot) splitting duties between drums, guitar and vocals on a single track. Through the fog of lo-fi recording, a new idea of black metal emerges, one that's elaborate, atmospheric and violent, as heard on “Witches Sabbath,” “Night Of The Graveless Souls” (which we'll later find on the Emperor EP) and “My Empire's Doom” (which will become “Beyond The Great Vast Forest” on the debut album). It's enough to land a deal with the fledgling Candlelight label.

Samoth gives up singing to focus on guitar, while Ihsahn splits his time between guitar, keyboards and vocals. Mortiis is still the bassist on the Emperor EP (1993), a release on which drums are played by Bård Guldvik “Faust” Eithun. The four tracks are already essential listening for black metal fans. Here we find the first versions of “I Am The Black Wizards” and “Cosmic Keys To My Creations And Times,” two gems that will appear in their definitive form on the debut album but which, even here, show off the band's great originality of sound.

The support of the aforementioned Euronymous also translates into a deal with his Deathlike Silence label, an imprint under which Emperor will nonetheless never release anything.

Meanwhile, in the summer of 1992, Samoth takes part, alongside other figures from the scene, in the infamous church burnings. In particular, in 1994 he will be sentenced to 16 months in prison for the arson of Skjold church in Vindafjord, together with Varg Vikernes, who had also hired him as a bassist for his “Aske” EP (1992). Mortiis too, having already left Emperor, is in prison during the same period, as is drummer Faust, also implicated in a murder that will bring his total sentence to 14 years. Even his replacement on bass, Terje “Tchort” Vik Schei, ends up behind bars. In effect, by 1994 only Ihsahn is a free man, and so the release of Emperor's debut album is inevitably delayed.

Already by 1993 the band's aesthetic is distancing itself from some of the stylistic conventions of Norwegian black metal, including corpse paint. Amid the turmoil caused by the deplorable criminal acts committed by many of the musicians involved in the project, on 21 February 1994 Emperor manage to release their debut album on the Candlelight label.

Hymns to Satan and black wizards

In The Nightside Eclipse opens with “Into The Infinity Of Thoughts,” and it's like being hurled at breakneck speed into a dizzying black abyss: a mournful initial symphonic flourish sets the icy, epic and funereal tone, also depicted on the cover, but over the rumble of thunder a cursed ride kicks off, a guitar drone mounted on obsessive drumming, with the Luciferian vocals rounding out the arrangement alongside keyboard touches; at the three-minute mark, after a possessed-sounding retch, the track not only resumes the breakneck pace it had already sustained but, through more intricate guitar work and more imposing symphonic backing, spills over from the ferocious into the epic and the gothic, complete with vampiric wheezing and a danse macabre at the four-minute mark; a liturgical choir stands in stark contrast with the bestial vocal outbursts, which reach a peak in the nearly twenty seconds of scream at the seven-minute mark, the war cry that drives the final assault, a climax that rises even further after the solemn declaration “The land will grow black/ there is no sunrise yet to come.”

After the nine minutes of the opener, In The Nightside Eclipse stays true to its intentions. “The Burning Shadows Of Silence” reveals, in its midtempo passages, a heavy-metal background rooted in the 1980s that recalls the possessed thrash metal of Kreator, but it still pales next to the following “Cosmic Keys To My Creations And Times,” a whirlwind of ferocious, symphonic black metal with a frenzied folk dance at its core and a frightening display of guitar and rhythmic firepower.

Shifting between ferocious, majestic, exalted and funereal, the album finds an unstable balance that is its expressive strength: a sonic territory where changes in tempo, tone and arrangement, triggered by vocal excesses or symphonic surges, give the whole thing a monstrous vitality. It's not just a postcard from a maniacally dark world, but an exploration of the bowels of an eternal night, threatening and perversely fascinating.

“Beyond The Great Vast Forest,” opened by a retching scream, adds thrash-punk grit to the arsenal along with a Black Sabbath-like riff, while “Towards The Pantheon” opens with a melancholic arpeggio and thickens the assault with symphonic injections and a war march. All the while Emperor keep practicing a ferocious black metal, broadened by the band into an onslaught of extreme sounds but also of vivid, imaginative suggestions, sketched out through constant shifts in scenery, compositional twists, interludes and variations, as well as insisting on lyrics that, though steeped in pitch-black darkness, scatter philosophical and literary hooks throughout.

There's certainly the impact of a dark and hostile sonic world, but once we've grown accustomed to the unreal darkness of the abyss into which we've plunged, the details become increasingly distinct, and the shades between one black and another come to be appreciated.

Another retching scream opens “The Majesty Of The Nightsky,” frighteningly ferocious even coming after the previous five tracks. The assault is made more varied, though, by violent symphonic flare-ups that almost overwhelm the black-metal bombardment, by intricate guitar inlays, and by a disorienting atmospheric thinning-out before the possessed finale.

Given all this, the fact that the final pair of tracks can still add something feels all the more remarkable. Across six compositions, Emperor have carried black metal into a layered and dynamic system of sonic references which, without betraying the genre's roots, reinterprets its aesthetic aims with tremendous creative richness.

In The Nightside Eclipse has a progressive spirit without embracing the more baroque and virtuosic sides of that world, instead channeling its romantic vein through significant gothic and decadent contamination. And all this, as noted, even leaving aside the two closing tracks, the ones that have endured most vividly in the black-metal imagination, whether because they close an album widely cited across the board as one of the genre's masterpieces, or simply for their own intrinsic strength.

“I Am The Black Wizards” sounds like a manifesto, in the way it sums up the fundamental elements of their sound, with frequent shifts in arrangement and a remarkable deployment of different approaches. “Inno a Satana”, its title inspired by the famous poem by Giosuè Carducci, is equally significant, since it crosses sulfurous imagery with a more literary one, the ferocious with the intellectual, in a far more immediate form than other compositions on the album: under five minutes, with a symphonic choir that contrasts vividly with the bestial black-metal up front, and melodic inlays that reveal meticulous guitar work in crafting just the right soundscape.

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