LEPROUS unveil Aphelion.

NOTODDEN THEATER, NORWAY

It’s another night for the diehards. Already during the last 12 months, Leprous have allowed fans to choose the setlist for a livestreamed show, written the perplexing Nighttime Disguise over a six-day Zoom session with fans and performed two well-loved albums – 2017’s Malina and 2019’s Pitfalls – in full.

Tonight, they’re playing their genresplicing seventh album, Aphelion, two days before its release in front of a socially distanced crowd, with many more watching online. It’s another chance to lift the curtain and peek at the mechanics behind Leprous’s progressive, cerebral world as they reveal the stories behind the new songs.

Things kick off with album opener

Running Low, a song vocalist Einar

Solberg reveals was written while travelling up a mountain. “It sounds more spectacular than it was,” he chuckles, but even so, the song is stunning with Einar’s goose bumpinducing falsetto in full flight amid plinky guitars and dramatic brass, as cellist Raphael Weinroth-browne beams in remotely from his apartment. Bathed in a red glow, Norway’s finest are backed by unfussy production with no visuals and simple lights. As a result, the evening feels intimate and unshowy, almost like the band have pitched up in your living room for a chinwag about the album over a beer. Relaxed and chatty, their between-song reveals are often self-deprecating and never sound rehearsed. At one point, Einar jokingly tells drummer Baard Kolstad to “put your phone away” when he catches him sending a cheeky text behind the kit.

For an album that’s frequently denser and more musically diverse than 2019’s

Pitfalls, many of these tracks find their origins in those sessions. Einar explains

Silhouette, with its jerky guitars and nimble, intricate drumming, was one of the earlier cuts written for Pitfalls, as was The Shadow Side and slow-builder On Hold. The towering The Silent Revelation, on the other hand, started life as “one of the worst sketches” for Malina. Fun facts like these are lapped up by Leprous fans, yet all the informalities can’t mask

Aphelion’s palpable majesty. Live isn’t the best way to experience a Leprous album for the first time – theirs are songs that tend to unfurl their textures and intentions over repeated listens. But as closer Nighttime Disguise explodes in a thrilling pile-on of keys, brass and Einar’s now-rare screams, once again we’re left feeling like we’ve been handed the key to the mystifying world of one of heavy music’s most masterful and enigmatic of operators.

DANNII LEIVERS