Illuminate the Visage

Written by: Tom Wilson – Sense Music Media | Tuesday 16 November 2021

MØL (pronounced “Muuul” and meaning “moth”) are a sonic enigma. Latest single Visage opens with an almost pop-punk guitar and driving drums, before the vocals kick in, and the Warped Tour-style rock segues into icy black metal. This jarring collision of styles forms the beating heart of new album Diorama – a startling and euphoric ride through the peaks and valleys of the human experience. At home in Denmark, vocalist Kim pushed the plunger down on a fresh pot of coffee, and got ready to talk some SENSE …

My first exposure to you guys was a Facebook video of your live version of Visage, and one of the comments described you as “a black metal take on BLINK 182”. [Laughs]

I think the funniest description of MØL is one reviewer who described us as “nasty glitter”.

It’s such a contrast. I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not a huge expert on black metal …

[Smiles] Neither am I.

“Blackgaze” is a really interesting hybrid of genres. What are some other genres of music that you think are crying out for a “blackening”?

See, that’s the thing. I know that the term “blackgaze” might be the easiest one to dive into, but, at least for this album, I know Nicolai, with his songwriting, has been way more focused on expanding. There is a lot of weird stuff going on, coming from a death metal or a metal perspective per se. I know he grew up with bands like SONIC YOUTH and a lot of the stuff that Kevin Shields did with guitars – a lot of alternative rock. So that’s where his main inspirations come from. I myself grew up with … I’ve played in hardcore bands, I’ve played in death metal bands, and have expanded a lot on what I’m doing with my voice. We’re like a mish-mash … maybe like the typical millennial in some sense, you know? We stand on the shoulders of older genres … We might have some really strong elements that we do see as essential, like the guitar work, with the guitar front and centre. We are a guitar band, but it’s the orchestration of the tracks after each other, and giving each song an individual identity – that’s pretty important for us.

We come from different places. I know my way of stumbling onto metal was actually through an old cassette tape when I was five years old. My uncle had a bunch of cassette tapes, with stories of Ivanhoe and kids’ songs and stuff like that. There was this particular tape, and it was recorded over with kids’ songs, and the last part of the tape – the last two-and-a-half minutes – it just sharply cuts into Battery by METALLICA, after the long intro. [Emulates the opening riffs] Imagine me sitting there, in my very religious home, with my very devout Christian family sitting there going, “What’s happening?” I just kept it in my Sony Walkman, and that tape, it’s destroyed today, because I reversed it so many times … I think my parents were like, “Where does this come from? How did he get to hear this? This is not Christian!” I remember my mum talking to my grandmother like, “Is he going to be like this forever?”

I did find my way into other genres, of course, but this is what I do now, as a thirty-two-year-old. [Laughs]

It’s interesting that you brought up coming from a religious family. Do you think that spurred on any specific kind of interest in black metal, and the occult imagery in that? Or is that not something you’re terribly interested in?

Not necessarily, but our album Diorama here … I’ve mentioned in several interviews that the movie Hereditary has been a cultural hook that I could hang specific experiences from my life onto. My parents were not just Christians; they were really into some extreme cult-like environments, and that has kind of coloured my worldview for most of my childhood. Going from one charismatic leader to the next, mainly because my parents are, in my opinion, too good for this earth. There is just a pattern of things coming from their parents, or lack of father figures and stuff like that, that makes you keep searching for it. That’s at least how I see it. When your dad is looking for his dad … how to be an adult male. How do you portray masculinity nowadays? I know that it’s also been a struggle for [my dad], talking about feelings, so I know that Diorama has been my way of confronting a lot of stuff.

You made a point about “what does it mean to be a man these days?” In what ways do you think masculinity is changing? Or the idea of what a “man” is?

You can only do so much for yourself from what you’ve been shown, is my opinion. I’ve had to go look for role models in some of my friends … and my friends’ parents and stuff like that. I have a tendency to have some of my best friends come from tour family … I think I reached a point during my adolescence when I felt that I was older than my parents … The male “values” that I’d seen were “hard working”, “don’t talk too much” and “don’t talk about your feelings.” Be good, be honest and all of these things, but at the same time, when we were in those environments, I could just see people that I saw as heroes just constantly failing me; manipulating either my parents or people we were around. I think I saw metal as a way to reclaim some of that … There’s something ballsy about standing on stage and just yelling at people in their faces. At the same time, I feel a great sense of vulnerability in that, because the things I scream about come from a place of hardship.

My fiancé’s father, he’s a totally different man than what I’ve seen in other parents. He’s a soft man, and I really enjoy conversations with him, because that is the main focus when we’re around each other. I might go out and bang my chest like a gorilla when I’m onstage, and that might be my sense of reclaiming some weird sense of masculinity, but in some sense I also feel that it doesn’t need to be strictly male or strictly female. There is a vulnerability that I feel that we have to redefine. I see a great strength in that, in having the courage to stand up for what you’re feeling – not denying that rage is a powerful force, and anger is not a bad feeling. It’s about the consequences that it can bring about if you don’t know how to balance that feeling, or if you keep pushing that down. Coming back to the album concept of Diorama, I feel that the music, or the album that I’ve helped make, is a representation of our lives. We can look at it from different angles. We can see the shadows and the light, and all the dirty things, but also all the pretty things, and come to terms with that. In some sense, I feel that the last track, our title track, it’s the feeling of standing on top of the hill and looking down from the valley that you left behind you. You can’t see the picture fully when you’re going through that valley or through that smoke or through that darkness, but when you take a look back … I don’t know if it makes sense, but you can just say that I did travel that road. It’s not something that’s obscure to me now. I can see where I’ve been, and I’m acknowledging what I’ve seen. It makes you better prepared for whatever comes next.

Diorama is out now on Nuclear Blast

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