It’s felt longer than five years since Stormkeep released their debut record, Tales of Othertime, because nothing has satisfied the craving for bombastic, fantastical, symphonic black metal in the same way. The two singles from their upcoming sophomore album, The Nocturnes Of Iswylm, revealed that Stormkeep aren’t serving seconds. They’ve developed a taste for blood and sacrificed their prancing, dungeon synthing, and dragon-summoning. It’s a harsh mutation for the Denver group, one that permits them to explore the psychology of their protagonist, The Seer, and their goth influences.
Guitarist, vocalist, and principal composer Grandmaster Otheyn Vermithrax Poisontongue spoke with me at length about The Nocturnes of Iswylm, covering everything from how its lore connects to Tales of Othertime, their expanded riff repertoire, the deliberate absence of dungeon synth interludes, and more. As the record isn’t set to release until late June, the Grandmaster provided a set of study materials to prepare you for it.
“Nevermore’s Dreaming Neon Black, Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust, and Nightbreed by Clive Barker, the film. Then, go play some Magic: The Gathering or D&D and listen to the Heroes of Might and Magic 3 soundtrack. And then you’ll get it.”
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There’s a clear connective tissue from Galdrum to Tales of Othertime, but this new album is totally different.
There’s definitely the core of Stormkeep in there, but it felt important for us to do something in a somewhat new direction, just to keep us interested. Also, it’s been five years, so to me, it would be a disservice to try to just do that again because with Tales of Otherertime, I felt very good about how it turned out. I feel like we succeeded in what we were trying to do. Pushing ourselves out of our comfort zone was a big thing too. And, you’ll notice on the new record that there’s not much of the dungeon synth going on anymore. That was a very purposeful decision. I love that stuff and it’s a huge part of what the band is about. We put out a dungeon synth EP even, but I think with how the scene is, it’s very oversaturated at this point. It felt like we had nothing else to say on that style. So, we felt really good about where we left everything from Tales from Othertime and wanted to push ourselves into something a little bit more symphonic and orchestral, influenced by orchestral scores of video games, specifically the Heroes of Might and Magic 3 soundtrack.
Wanting to try new stuff is an interesting problem for Stormkeep, because your music tells a concrete story. Everything is set in Elda. So, how did you shift the tone and make changes while keeping everything narratively consistent?
So the last record was more or less music first, and the concept came out of the music, and I designed the storyline after that. But on the new record, it was very clear to me that it had to follow this particular storyline involving The Seer right after. It’s a direct sequel to Tales of Othertime, narratively, but the reason the tone is so different is because the aftermath of the last record is that The Seer created a problem, which is awakening the Dragon Queen. She rules the Dragon Kings as the head of The Dragon Order, and she uses her magic to bring out these Nathaarians, which are these reptilian creatures from another time, essentially, and they take over Elda. When the Seer uses the Serpent Stone to bring her to defeat The Conjurer and end the problems that he saw in the first record, he ends up being cursed by the Serpent Stone with this sort of vampirism.
The Nathaarians, Dragon Kings, and the Dragon Queen all have to live off of human essence to survive. They’re not specifically vampires; they’re reptilian beings that require human essence. By using the Serpent Stone, The Seer’s connected himself to this bloodline and is now required to absorb human life through blood. We find The Seer right after realizing that he has been cursed with this and that he is the cause of the enslavement of the world because he has awakened the Dragon Queen.
That’s the whole concept of the album. With it, it felt very necessary to go in a darker direction with the music. Tales of Othertime has this very high fantasy, fanciful vibe but it’s also playful, so this album felt like it needed to be a bit more introspective and a bit darker and melancholic. Also, we asked how we could use that idea of being cursed with this hunger, with this affliction, to get into other themes that were not explored on the last record? Desire, greed, the deadly sins of Christianity, but also the idea that human nature is essentially vampiric. We live off of the Earth in a way that we use and abuse nature and each other.
The album uses that as a metaphor for waking up to your own place as a human being, but using this vampiric idea to explore that. The Seer’s journey of self-discovery and introspection, and then what does he do to try to rectify that? And that is, fighting the Dragon Queen at the end.
Because of that, did you feel you were able to put more of yourself or your own doubts or struggles into the music?
Yeah, generally speaking. Even on the last record, oftentimes The Seer speaks in first person in certain parts of the album. I dove into that even more on this record. Using my own experience in this weird world that we’re in, and flipping religious ideas and thinking about how we each experience the world that way and how we’re told certain things about what the world is. Anyone who is interested in furthering their own mental acuity or intelligence will rebel at some point against whatever they were taught because they come to the idea of “maybe some of the stuff that I was told is not true.”
The idea of the hero’s journey is also a huge part of it. Joseph Campbell is a huge inspiration for a lot of the storytelling and was on the last record as well. Campbell’s hero’s journey like a circle. When you get to the bottom, that’s called the cave. And metaphorically, that’s the darkest place to be. That’s usually when the main character has to face themselves. They have to face their darkest fears and all those things. In a way, I see this whole album as being in the cave, in that dark place of self-reflection and having to fight oneself, in a way.
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You said in an interview before that you intend to preserve the essence and elements of a faraway land before time. Which, Tales of Othertime did that to a tee. This album somewhat does it, but with a negative tilt and tint. What were the important things when you were trying to make sure this wasn’t just giving that same feeling that Tales of Othertime did?
I would say that there are specific things that are what I call Stormkeep-isms that we include on pretty much every song. And it’s more or less a riff style. It’s a language that we’ve built over the course of the lifetime of the band. On the last record, there are really only two modes, like keys, that the songs are written in. It’s basically just G minor and D minor. We used G minor as the lighter side of the album and D minor was the darker side because it was lower. When it goes into D minor, for example, the song “Serpent Stone” is mostly in D minor, that’s when the dark stuff happens on Tales of Othertime.
When we were working on this new record, instead of just doing those two keys, we went all over the place. There are all these other spots on the fretboard that we would not have used on the last record that ended up being used. Some of the songs were actually written with the keyboards and symphonics in mind first. Using that as a jumping-off point was really useful for breaking the mold. Using minor seconds and tritones immediately evoke those darker, more evil, and sinister sounds and pushed us out of our comfort zones.
That basically expanded the musical aspect. And then there are many other things. Like, for example, the clean vocals. I’m doing all of them this time. Last time it was Shield Anvil from Caladan Brood. It was an intentional thing for me because the lyrics are a little bit more personal. It was an important aspect for me to expand myself into that role as well.
But for this record, we took more from goth music instead of power metal. It has some of that, obviously, but it was a mixture of Brendan Perry from Dead Can Dance, Fields of the Nephilim, and Type O Negative, with Nevermore and Blind Guardian. That was brought in to make the clean vocals a bit sadder. Bringing in actual live strings was a huge part as well, because on the last record, it was all keyboards and a harp on one song. But on this one, we were very intentional to make it more symphonic and boisterous in that cinematic way. We enlisted Andrea Morgan, who’s done a bunch of stuff with a lot of bands, for all of the strings, violin, viola, and cello as well. That brought the album into a new direction.
What I immediately noticed was how much more condensed it was. It seems like you guys got really bold with your guitar playing. Tales of Othertime is more about scene-setting, whereas this one is tighter and more insular.
I’ve always said, from the beginning of the band to now, that the riff is the most important part of the song. That being said, on the last record, we had four very long songs that were for more scene setting, they had more room to breathe these epic passages. But on this record, we intentionally wanted to make it tighter, to work on the songwriting aspect, I guess you could say, of the band. Key changes were a huge part of what that meant. Taking a riff and actually modulating it four steps up, or something like that.
Another rule we put on the new record was actually no interludes at all. And that was to put the listener in this specific world more consistently instead of breaking it up so much. On Tales of Othertime, I think that works so well because it takes you to this other place and you get to exist in it. Whereas the new record is an experience from front to back. It feels like a much more dramatic, dire situation.
I know you say they’re technically Nathaarians, but why did you shift your focus to vampires?
It was always in the back of our minds. I’m obviously a huge fan of all the media around vampires, specifically pre-2000. Everything from Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire, Subspecies, the OG Dracula movies, like the Hammer films, Nosferatu, the original and the Klaus Kinski and Werner Herzog one from the 70s. That aesthetic, to me, is very black metal. We’re not the first band to figure that out, but there was something about the style of metal that felt like it was an easy jump. It was in the back of our minds from probably the beginning of the band. We have this fantasy world and something that not a lot of vampire black metal bands do is fantasy vampires. Usually, it’s a gothic vampire, a modern take on it. Like, V Empire, or Dark Faerytales in Phallustein by Cradle of Filth, Spiritual Black Dimensions by Dimmu Borgir, that era, which is definitely an influence on what we’re doing.
But I also thought that the nexus point of those styles is Stormkeep, which is blending Swedish melodic black metal with the Norwegian style of black metal and fantasy elements. I saw this little gap of space that had not been filled yet by any band, whether it be Cradle of Filth or otherwise, where we had something to say, because we wouldn’t make something if it’s already been done entirely or if we’ve already done it.
Were there any sources or inspirations that you pulled from for the new album that you didn’t on Tales of Othertimes?
The last record was much more in the Ursula K. Le Guin, Tales of Earthsea, The Elder Scrolls, Skyrim vibe or just high fantasy, Lord of the Rings, archetypal stuff. We’ve all been very interested in pushing it into this other direction and are inspired film, video games, and comics. Another example is Todd McFarlane’s Spawn, the HBO series. Specifically because it deals with this one character who is cursed. It was very inspirational to the storyline and got me back into Spawn in general and the darker side of comics. Phantom Emperor Nebula Husk and I are both huge fans of stuff like Alan Moore and, unfortunately, he is cancelled now, but Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean’s art. He did a bunch of art for metal bands back in the day, but he was a huge inspiration aesthetically on the new record.
Actually, Nevermore is a huge influence, because that was a band that pulled goth and darker themes, but into power metal, or whatever you want to call what they’re doing. On a lot of those records in the 90s, they were just doing something different. That was the benchmark, to me, of what you could do with metal that has those theatrical qualities but deals with darker subjects.
Also, listening to soundtracks like Subspecies, Re-Animator, and any of Richard Band’s was huge. But also Heroes of Might and Magic 3, playing Elden Ring, which is dark and has this foreboding atmosphere, watching Vampire Hunter D, reading Berserk, stuff like that. The darker side of fantasy, I guess you could say.
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Since Tales of Othertime came out, it’s been regarded almost as a high watermark of 2020s black metal. How does that feel for you since Stormkeep is only one of your many projects?
Stormkeep is my project. You could say I am a huge creative force in Blood Incantation. In Wayfarer, I take more of a backseat, but I write a lot of the music for Blood Incantation with Paul Paul Riedl, so I do feel like I get to be creative in that band. But, at the end of the day, the concepts and the direction comes from Paul or the band as a whole. We’re a very democratic band. Not that Stormkeep is not democratic. It actually is. But Stormkeep is very much my brainchild, and that’s where all the stuff comes from. The kernels of what’s going to be always start with what I’m doing and what I’m thinking of, then we all write the songs together. That puts a lot of pressure on me.
With Tales of Othertime, again, I feel like we succeeded very much in what we were trying to do. Not only did we feel very good about that record, and felt like we did something very much true to ourselves and it was the record we wanted to make, but it resonated with people quite a lot all over the world. That being said, there was a looming fear of sophomore album syndrome if we did that album again. That might be very exciting for people, but they’d probably say that Tales of Othertime is just better. So it was more exciting and more interesting to do something that tips Stormkeep on its head a little bit. Because, in a way, maybe that gets me away from trying to having to top Tales of Othertime, because if it’s a totally new thing, then it exists on its own. Maybe people won’t like that, but that’s where my mind was coming from.
Tell me more about The Seer. What’s his story?
On the first album, The Seer is the ultimate good guy. He doesn’t understand why he’s doing the things, but he’s ultimately fighting evil. To me, it was important for him to basically become the evil that he thought he was fighting. And that’s what The Nocturnes of Iswyln is about. You are now the evil that you thought you were against. How do you deal with that? And how do you come to terms with that experience of seeing yourself as the villain in a way?
Spawn has a similar trajectory. In the beginning, he’s just working for the military. He’s just this guy. He’s like, “I’m a badass. I’m fighting for the government. The government’s great. I believe in the government.” Then he gets killed by his own guys and makes a deal with Hell and becomes this demon. In his mind, he believes he’s still that guy that he was. Over the course of time, he realizes that he is not and that he has given up that life. That character arc really interests me because that’s the experience of being human. You grow up, you are taught that we’re the best, especially in America, we’re the saviors of the world. Not every person, obviously, there are exceptions, but most people are taught that their family or whoever they are is good. And we know that that’s not always true. There are plenty of examples in religion of “You should just follow this, and this is gonna make you a good person,” then some people follow that line, and then they end up killing other people or doing things in the name of God that they’ve now convinced themselves is the right thing. Thankfully, some percentage of people actually wake up to that and recognize this is all actually very bad and we shouldn’t do that.
A metaphor exists in there as well, of being passed down an evil, the sin of inheritance. The sins of the father beget the sins of the son. If a family has a bad seed that can predispose others to it. Many people accept that as, “My family does it, so why wouldn’t I do that?” And there’s actually not even a barrier to questioning those thoughts and actions.
And with vampyrism and inheriting evil from someone else, there are so many ways to use that metaphor. I’ve said this already in another interview, but the vampire myth gets a very sexy, very cool version of that. It’s always “How sick is it to be a vampire?” Tom Cruise hanging out in a nice giant villa, drinking the blood of maidens. All very cool. But when I was thinking of what it would be like to actually be a vampire, I saw that it would be horrible. That’s the other side of it, which is not explored as much, especially in fiction. Nosferatu explores it, though. He’s a decrepit creature that is barely alive. He’s so hamstrung by his condition. It’s controlling him to the point that he can’t even function as a normal being. And that interested me as well as it’s like an addiction. It could be anything, sex, drugs. It’s that crippling desire that basically breaks people into being horrifying creatures on the street. It’s a similar character as Gollum from The Lord of the Rings. His whole being becomes bent on this desire for this one thing.
The story with The Seer is his experience of that, but knowing that that’s not how it should be, and wondering why he’s being pulled into it if he’s a powerful wizard. He should be able to pull himself out, yet he can’t. It’s a juxtaposition, which I’m sure many people experience with addiction and being like, “I know that I shouldn’t do this intellectually, but now I’m ruining my life.”
And I think deeper into this album is actually what was shown on the last record, which is the Dragon Queen is not actually evil. The whole idea of the story is that what the protagonist sees as his antagonist is not actually evil. It’s just what is seen as evil to human beings. Human beings see things that interrupt our hegemony on the world as bad. Think of natural disasters and disease. The Dragon Queen represents nature in its deepest sense, in that she’s a thousands and thousands of years old being that is without time, without space, and she doesn’t care about humans. She’s just doing what she would do. It’s like seeing a mountain lion in the wilderness. It isn’t evil. Even if it’s trying to kill you. It’s just existing.
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The Nocturnes of Iswylm releases June 12 via Vesperian.
