Kvelertak: “This isn’t about Vikings, this is the history of the actual place that we are from”

Ivar Nickolaisen has never met Helmut Von Botnlaus. Truth be told, says Kvelertak​’s frontman, very few people have. The legend of Helmut goes something like this: born at the tail end of World War II to a German soldier father and a local 16-year-old mother, as he grew up Helmut became a pariah in his small hometown in southwest Norway’s Stavanger region, from where Kvelertak themselves hail.  “It was really hard to be the child of a German and a woman who was seen as betraying her country by being with one,” Ivar explains. ​“A mob forced him to run away and up to the mountains, where he stayed all his life, growing more and more misanthropic, and against the modern world.” Helmut’s was a name that Ivar kept coming across during long walks thro...

unsplash-logoLilith Redmoon