An acquaintance recently reached out to tell this scribe about an exciting and relatively new musical project that he was part of, sporting the intriguing and seductively dark moniker that is IHXHI. Included was a private link to a digital promo containing a frighteningly brilliant, highly atmospheric, and all-out mesmerising EP titled Unheeding Sun, which moved seamlessly back and forth between forward-thinking and intense black metal, melancholy avantgarde music, and cinematic ambient with subtle noirish flourishes to it. The aforementioned acquaintance was none other than the talented Lars Emil Måløy, a multi-instrumentalist whose impressive musical resume also lists the legendary Dødheimsgard and the experimental post-black metal project If Nothing Is among other things. We caught up with the gentleman to discuss what he has been up to these past few years, but on top of that we were fortunate enough to have IHXHI vocalist Regn join our little chat too.
Greetings Lars Emil, how are things at your end? The last time we spoke you had just released the remastered version of the stunning self-titled offering by If Nothing Is*, and lots of things have obviously happened since then.* Dødheimsgard released the masterpiece that is Black Medium Current in 2023, and two magnificent EPs by the intriguing entity IHXHI have also seen the light of day since then (in 2025 and 2026 respectively). You never stay still for long, do you? Always pushing musical boundaries.
Lars: Hi there, nice to talk to you again! Everything’s fine over here. Loads to do as always, in both music and life in general, but that’s the way I like it. There have been some more releases since we last spoke, like the Khôra album Timaeus and the Void album Jadjow. On the Khôra album, I composed the outro and made the bass lines, and on the Void release I made some songs and lyrics as well. The song ‘Void – When Lucifer Dies’ started with just the complete bass line, and then the other musicians had to fill in the blanks. The crew consisted mainly of past and present DHG musicians (me, Camille Giraudeau, George Anagnostopoulos and Matt Jarman), and we made the album remotely due to the pandemic. Other interesting things that happened since last we spoke was that we played a show with Dødheimsgard‘s twisted sister act Doedsmaghird last year, and at last year’s Inferno festival both DHG and IHXHI (pronounced ī-shī) were on the bill. A week ago, we played two shows on the Caribbean metal cruise known as 70000 Tons of Metal, together with IHXHI songwriter, guitarist and vocalist Regn in the choir. So yeah, there’s always a lot going on.
When you took the Black Medium Current album out on the road and played a number of gigs, how did that go, and did the material translate well into a concert setting? Everything just sort of came together on that phenomenal LP, did it not? It is possibly the best record I have heard this decade, which is saying something. It must have been incredibly stimulating to have been a part of its creation.
Lars: Thanks for telling me, I’m happy to hear that. It was quite different from playing the songs from past albums live. In general, the older songs are quite fast and intense, so I guess we’re homing in on that energy in the way we play them as well. The Black Medium Current songs are more in line with perhaps rock music in sound and feel, so it’s more important to play it steady and focus on the feeling as opposed to blasting away at full speed. I like playing both the new and old songs live, even though they provide a different live experience for us on stage. But in general, I have gotten more goosebumps from playing the BMC songs, even though I absolutely love the old DHG songs. I especially remember at the Roadburn Festival when we performed the outro I made for the album, ‘Requiem Aeternum’, and people were crying, us on stage were crying, and it was just a beautiful moment. Vicotnik (guitarist and vocalist) came up with the title without me telling him that my goal was to make the ultimate requiem, so I guess it really does sound like a requiem. A fun fact is that the original musical direction for that song was chosen by Vicotnik, and that was to have something inspired by Ane Brun‘s ‘Last Breath’. If you just take a listen to that song, I think you’ll be surprised by how close they are in feel, although ‘Requiem Aeternum’ ended up being its own thing.
The recent EP by IHXHI titled Unheeding Sun was a welcome surprise. Everything about it oozed quality, from the artwork and song titles to the musicianship and the production values, not to mention the compositions themselves. As with your other bands, it is exploratory and innovative in nature, but it sounds completely different to them. Tell us a bit about how that group came into existence and what the motivation and aim behind it was.
Lars: I’ll let IHXHI‘s prime mover and vocalist Regn answer this one.
Regn: Two years ago, I was spending the winter in an old cabin far up in the mountains. I spent a lot of time writing musical ideas, and a new direction in my songwriting started to take form. I had just finished my studies in Norwegian folk music, which was super interesting and a whole world of its own that I did not know much about before. But after analysing music through years of study, I needed to get back into a creative flow again that felt intuitive and raw to me, as well as somehow go back to my roots. During this period, I listened to a lot of old and new black metal and post-black metal like Emperor, Dødheimsgard, Constellatia, Crow Black Sky, Liturgy, Messier 16 etc., and then came to life the first sketches for ‘Pale Like Frozen (Key of Dignity)’ and ‘Silent Mass (Key of Obligation)’ that would later become the first IHXHI EP. Then Lars Emil came into my life. He embraced my creative ideas with so much love and passion, so the music and the band came into shape. IHXHI is a creative room for us to express all feelings, thoughts and impressions through music, but it is important to us to be true to a certain aesthetic framework. We wanted to play our music live, so we needed three live musicians and got Jens Noteng on drums as well as Myrvandrer and Alexander Lange on guitars. Before releasing our first EP, we were offered a spot to play at Inferno Metal Festival 2025, which was a huge accomplishment for us. Then we started working on our second EP titled Unheeding Sun.
I am dying to know more about the evocative song titles, the lyrics, and the overall themes and ideas that course through said piece of work. What can you tell us about its content? It is theatrical and dramatic to a certain extent, but almost hypnotic as well, and despite its avantgarde flavours, it never appears pompous or overblown. ‘In Afterglow’ is a great title that conjures up a myriad of thoughts.
Regn: Late summer of 2024, I sent a sketch called ‘Unheeding Sun’ to Lars Emil. The sketch was about 5 minutes long and consisted of guitar riffs, some atmospheric landscapes and vocals. The production he made and sent in return was like a musical love letter to me, and since then we have been making music together. We also have become a couple and moved in with each other. So, in that sense, it is a romantic love story, actually 🙂 The lyrics of ‘Unheeding Sun’ was initially about breaking free from, or becoming aware of, one’s own unconscious belief systems and how they shape one’s life. That developed further into an ethereal, spiritual love poem inspired by nature/the cosmos, existential questions that we like to discuss, books, articles and old texts that we like to dive into as well as other inspirational lyrics and poems that eventually shaped the final lyrics for ‘Unheeding Sun’.
‘In Afterglow’ is about the transition from one state of being to another, with a metaphoric language that corresponds to ideas, theories and concepts about reality, creation, the existence of eternal souls, mind over matter, the afterlife or states between lives, the nature of consciousness etc. The lyrics are very personal and tell the story of our own transitioning from difficult times and emotional trials to our becoming partners in life and creation.
What specific albums and bands were your favourites in your formative years and helped shape you as a person, or inspire you to become a musician, as it were?
Lars: I was really into bands like Deathspell Omega, Dødheimsgard, Armagedda, Virus, Ved Buens Ende, Ulver, Code, Emperor, 1349, The Legion, Aeon, Deicide, Necrophagist, Mayhem, Keep of Kalessin, Behemoth, Windir, Opeth and Dissection. I listened to music all the time, unless I was playing guitar, piano or bass. I also listened to a lot of bands outside of metal, like Radiohead, Daft Punk, Gorillaz and 16 Horsepower. Specific albums and outputs that inspired me were Reclaim and Armada by Keep of Kalessin, Supervillain Outcast and 666 International by Dødheimsgard, FAS by Deathspell Omega, Nouveau Gloaming by Code, and Carheart by Virus to name a few. But some years before that, which would be around the time I started playing bass and guitar, I was much more into bands like Iron Maiden, Genesis and Focus. I had two bass teachers, one coming from prog rock and one that gave me a lot of Bach pieces arranged for bass. And I played in a fusion band and a jazz band at that time. So, a lot of different influences, I guess.
Regn: I bought my first cassette for my birthday money when I was 7 or 8; that was Michael Jackson‘s Dangerous. For many years, I listened to a variety of pop and rock music while learning to sing and play the piano. Growing up I was especially inspired by dark emotive pop music like Susanne Sundfør, Fever Ray, Björk, Sigur Rós, Lana Del Rey and many more. Nearly 20 years ago I was introduced to black metal, and especially Emperor, Opeth, Immortal, 1349, Mayhem and Windir were some of my absolute biggest favourites from the beginning. With the becoming of IHXHI, the most important album influences that inspire my writing are Dødheimsgard‘s Black Medium Current, ColdWorld‘s Melancholie², Constellatia‘s Magisterial Romance, Crow Black Sky‘s Sidereal Light Vol.2, Messier 16‘s Death Poems, Liturgy‘s 93696, Opeth‘s Ghost Reveries and Blackwater Park, and Emperor‘s In the Nightside Eclipse and Anthems to the Welkin at Dusk with the latter inspiring me greatly when it comes to vocals and lyrics.
Tell me about your upbringing in terms of whether there was a lot of music around in general when growing up. Were you exposed to a lot of different music at home? Where do you think that instinct and drive to experiment with various styles of music comes from?
Lars: I was bottled up on jazz, prog rock and R&B, so stuff like Al Jarreau, Michael Jackson, Seal, D’Sound, Deep Purple, Pink Floyd, and ELP were the first stuff that caught my ear. Like every boy in the 90s I was into Backstreet Boys, 50 Cent, Rammstein and other popular stuff. In my teens I went straight from listening to primarily heavy metal to death metal. I was drawn to that genre because of its raw and brutal sound, and how fresh and different it felt to everything I had heard before it. It almost had no rules in form of tonality and time signatures, and that was refreshing. Then there was a shift in what was acceptable to listen to, so suddenly everyone listened to Burzum, yet I stood by death metal’s side for a bit longer than the rest. I think I understood what the deal with black metal was when I stumbled across Emperor, 1349 and other bands that wrote a little more complex stuff. It also had some kind of soul that most death metal lacked. It sounded like it was written by some superior beings, boiling over with both feeling and mind-boggling complexity. Old school black metal took a while longer to get into, but Armagedda‘s Ond Spiritism record was the one that really opened my eyes to metal with a bit dirtier sound and repetitive songs. Then after some years, metal became a bit boring to me. But as I thought I had heard all the good metal bands there was, a good friend of mine showed me Dødheimsgard, and my mind was blown. It was so good on so many levels, both spiritually and technically, and it sounded like no other band. Then sometime later I started writing music for If Nothing Is, which was inspired by DHG’s writing, and the same friend (namely Vegard who is the drummer of If Nothing Is) told me Vicotnik from DHG had written online that he wanted to work on other people’s projects. So, I sent him a song, and here we are almost 20 years later, making music together and playing around the globe. Fun fact: Vicotnik also got inspired by some of the music I made, so the last part of DHG’s ‘God Protocol Axiom’ is actually inspired by the clean section of If Nothing Is‘ ‘Sovereign’.
Regn: I grew up in a home where music was part of our daily routines like singing lullabies before bedtime and around the dining table. I also sang in children’s choirs. My mom is a blues vocalist and songwriter, and I joined her band rehearsals many times in childhood and youth. So obviously that inspired me very much. I was exposed to a lot of music from a young age, both old and contemporary popular music, blues and rock, Christian music, classical music etc. Also, I moved a lot during childhood and early adult life, so I was introduced to new music, new music traditions and new music environments everywhere I lived. The first band I played in was the black metal band named Kvaelt, where I played the synthesiser. Then in the coming years I joined several other bands playing different musical styles. When I began studying music in my late twenties, I had a curiosity to explore new worlds of music as well as finding my own “roots”, and I eventually stumbled upon the Norwegian Folk Music program at the University of South-Eastern Norway, where I did my master’s degree in folk singing.
The drive to find my own roots or my own “source of creativity” increased even more after the studies, and getting real clear and honest about my preferences, my perspectives and my way of thinking and navigating in this world, led me back to the black metal scene, exploring and finding my passion for music and writing again especially through subgenres like atmospheric, cosmic, and post-black metal.
What does 2026 hold for you in terms of creative endeavours? It seems that you are on a roll when it comes to crafting and recording material for IHXHI*, so perhaps another EP will take shape this year and then be released in early 2027?*
Lars: For IHXHI we want to release some merch and a physical version of both EPs on the same CD/LP with some bonus tracks added, or just an intro/outro. We haven’t been open to signing with any labels yet, as we wanted to do everything on our own, but we’re actually starting to see that signing with a label would do us some good in terms of promotion, pressing music and merch. And we want to start working on the next release soon, most likely an album. When we write, I usually record stuff and do some production right away, and I love being in control of that, but that often results in me wanting to have control over the mix as well. The only problem is that I’m not a big fan of mixing. Too much work, and it takes away some of the joy of writing music for me. So perhaps, if I can manage to do it, I’d like to give someone else the mixing job on a future album, yet I can already feel that it’s gonna be hard to let go of the control.
Regn: Our next release will probably be a full-length album, and I’m really looking forward to the next creative phase, when new ideas come to life. I really love that stage of the process. We will probably release our album some time in 2027.
Is there any exciting news from the twisted and unpredictable camp of DHG? Any projects in the works that you feel like telling us about?
Lars: We’re working on some new material, but I can’t share anything specific at this time. Slowly and steadily the musical direction is starting to take shape. We are all quite busy with respect to jobs, family and other band projects, but working on what’s next for DHG is always a priority.
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