Drummer Kjetil-Vidar "Frost" Haraldstad of Norwegian black metallers SATYRICON spoke to VirtualFestivals.com at this year's edition of the Bloodstock Open Air festival about the progress of the songwriting sessions for the band's next album, tentatively due in late 2017. He said: "We have come very far. I mean, we make so much material. I can safely say we have probably made more than three hundred themes for this album but now we have concentrated all the material into actual songs, and narrowing things down is really what we are doing now. We are deciding what songs will end up on the album." He continued: "The music we have made and things that have been difficult to work with, we will leave it at that, because it didn't fit into songs that we were crystallizing in that period. So now we have like ten, twelve pieces of music that are more or less in the stages of becoming finished, and they feel like really good songs. We will record the album probably in January, and release it next year." Asked if there is a specific theme that runs through the songs that have been written for SATYRICON's next album, Frost said: "No. It feels more creative than anything we have done before. I think that we managed to open quite a few doors, creatively, than with previous albums at least. This dynamic element was important. What I have been feeling is all those doors lead somewhere, and we have been exploring them and the result is what you will hear on that next album. It will go much further than previous albums, and I think it will be a very loaded album. Intense, very very diverse. An album impossible to sum up in a few words, which is a good thing." SATYRICON celebrated the 20th anniversary of its seminal album "Nemesis Divina" with a never-to-be-repeated series of exclusive European shows, wherein the Norwegian trailblazers performed the album in its entirety for the first and last time. To herald the 20th anniversary of this most illustrious piece of dark art, "Nemesis Divina" was re-released in spring 2016, newly remastered by Satyr himself and boasting upgraded and revamped packaging worthy of an album that has had a huge and enduring impact on both the black metal scene and underground heavy music in general.
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