Ihsahn pondered the circumstances under which new Emperor material might happen earlier this year, giving us all a little hope for the black metal legends to rise again.
Unfortunately in a new interview with GRIMM Gent, Ihsahn reiterated that Emperor's final record Prometheus: The Discipline Of Fire & Demise was essentially a solo record, and that his solo career over the past 20-ish years has been creatively fulfilling enough. So the opportunity and creative window for Emperor isn't exactly wide open. Though Ihsahn does note that he's giving definitive "no"s in the past to things that eventually happened, so who knows?
"It kind of came to a very natural conclusion — in the sense that by the last… I eventually started writing more and more of the material, and by the last record, I did everything. And Prometheus was kind of — I did that very much as a solo thing, and it goes still under the Emperor umbrella. So creatively, when there's no melt anymore and Samoth and Trym were doing Zyklon — we wanted different things creatively."
"At this point, it doesn't look like [there will be new music from Emperor]. But I've said a lot of 'no's in the past, also, like, there would never be another Emperor show. And I feel stupid when I say stuff like that and end up doing it anyway, so just to not to open that box, but it's, like, I won't make myself into a liar if the situation should change and that the planets will align. With creativity and stuff like that, it's very, very hard to tell, because it's a very open, channeling process. But so far I'm very, very… I get to… Yeah, I've been releasing full-length albums consistently more or less every second year since I was 16 and continue to do so. So I'm in a very happy place."
Emperor recently hit the road across North America for a handful of dates celebrating their 1997 album Anthems To The Welkin At Dusk.
