The Norwegian prog metallers have returned after a 14-year hiatus with new album Leaves Of Yesteryear.

“These are worrying times,” he admits, “both for the music scene and the world as a whole. But there’s been an explosion of online activity and live streamed concerts, and we are doing the same. The album release show we were going to play on May 23, we’re going to stream live instead. Of course, everything could be back to normal again by then, but I kind of doubt it. We’re a ‘more is more’ kind of band, so it’s probably not just going to be a concert, it’s going to be several hours of different kinds of interviews and stuff. We have to see it in a positive way and make the best out of it.”

Green Carnation’s reunion was never a certainty. As Nordhus recalls, “For the first five years after that split I thought it would be permanent. It was Tchort who decided to call it a day and when we talk about it now, the reason was that we really didn’t know what to do next. I think he felt that he’d lost a bit of control over the band and we’d all just moved in different directions all at the same time.”

The decision to reconvene came after they were asked to return to the unique site of a 2006 concert, recorded for the DVD A Night Under The Dam, where they played The Acoustic Verses in full with a string orchestra under the 30-foot Nåvatn-3 dam deep in the Norwegian mountains.

“It was a crazy location,” says Nordhus, “with millions and millions of gallons of water behind us. They were going to tear it down and they asked us if we wanted to do the last show there. And now everything is underwater. So that was enough for us to come back together and talk about whether we wanted to do this. That DVD holds a very special piece of

Green Carnation’s history, and that was a good enough excuse to try to see if we still enjoyed playing together, which, luckily, we did.

“Soon after that we started planning the 15th anniversary of Light Of Day, Day Of Darkness, because that was only two years away at the time. So we thought that could be our way back into the scene, and the original plan was just to play together for those shows and maybe, if it felt right, to do something more after that.”

If it was confirmation they were after, those shows playing Light Of Day… in full offered it to an extent the band themselves weren’t prepared for.

“The response from the crowds at the live shows was out of this world,” says Nordhus. “I remember when we were playing the first show in Bergen, the first show at a festival called Blastfest, and we didn’t expect it to be that emotional. We were a bit shocked afterwards. I talked to people who felt, as we say in Norway, chewed up and spat out again. It was mentally draining, and many of the people I talked to needed some time for themselves afterwards. Of course, we know that Light Of Day… is very special for people, but you don’t see people crying at a concert every day. So there was a lot of emotion going around, and it’s very powerful.”

As momentous as those shows were, including another rapturously received set at Tilburg at Netherlands’ revered Roadburn festival, the sense of triumph and reconnection, both to the band’s fans and their own sense of who they were, soon gave way to a period of soul-searching when it came to deciding how they were going to move forward.

“When we started doing a 2017 set,” Nordhus admits, “which consisted of everything else other than Light Of Day…, we weren’t quite able to recreate that magic live, and so we did a lot of thinking and adjusting. We went into ourselves and asked ourselves: ‘What are the best sides of Green Carnation? What are we doing best with this lineup? What don’t we do that well, for example?’ And you could say that, maybe, from 2000-2006, when we were quite active, it was kind of a searching period for us, because all our albums were so different. So we started to work on that live, and do the things we do best, that nobody else does. So getting back together, we talked a lot about what is Green Carnation in 2019?”