How's the latest US tour going so far?

It's been pretty good actually. We've played some pretty cool venues. Yea, it's been pretty cool, man.

How would you compare it to the two previous tours?

Probably the best one so far, definitely.

Why do you say that?

Probably because of the venues. It's bigger and the people seem to be a bit more into this time than the first time.

I just caught the tour in Philly recently. Great show.

Yea? Thank you.

What has the addition of Nick Barker, Galder and Simen (as a full-time member) brought to the band as far as writingm, touring, etc?

When it comes to writing the album, most of the materials were written before Galder joined in. So he just made some changes and stuff like that. Basically me and Silenoz and Mustis made most of the material on there.

I read in "Terrorizer" that Galder has been considering ending Old Man's Child in order to play with Dimmu Borgir full-time. I was wondering if he had made a decision either way yet and what types of things would factor into this decision?

He still has contracts with Century Media so he still has to do, I think, 2 or 3 more albums for them. But I think he wants to quit because it's a lot of hard work for him and he's the only person to do everything. When he goes on tour, he has to collect people from everywhere to find the right persons and he's just tired of it. And he just wanted to play with a professional musicians. He will still continue to do Old Man's Child albums.

Why did you choose to record at Studio Fredman instead of going back to the Abyss where the previous albums were recorded?

Basically because there are so many bands going into Abyss Studios these days and you can hear a typical Abyss sound in all the bands. We wanted to get away from that and try to capture our own sound. It was about time to try something new because we used Abyss for the three last albums, so we wanted to do something new.

How has the reaction to the new album been?

It's been overwhelming good...extremely great.

Is there any reason behind the three-word format for all your album titles? I just realized the trend.

It represents so much than one word or two words. I think we are going to continue with that as well. Because it's not like a concept album, but it still kind of represents all the different things on this album so it fits very well.

Speaking of which, what types of topics are being discussed on the album?

It's basically about misanthropia and anti-religous thoughts and stuff. Basically, it's very misanthropic.

Previous albums seem to revolve more around the keyboards where on "Puritanical Euphoric Misanthropia" the keyboards are more evenly mixed and the album is more guitar heavy. Was this intentional?

Yes, it was done on purpose. The keyboard is still a very important instrument within our music and 80% of the material is actually written on the keyboard. But we wanted to get a more straight-in-your-face, more heavy sound. So we decided to keep the keyboards a little bit lower. We also have the orchestra on this album.

That's actually something I was going to ask about. What do you think the orchestra added to the new record?

For us, it's a very good thing to do because...um, well, we use keyboards and so many other bands use keyboards and you can hear what kind of sound they're using and what kind of keyboard they're using and it sounds very plastic. So we felt it was about time to do the real thing and that's what we did. We used a real orchestra instead and it worked really great so that's also a thing we're going to continue in the future as well.

Do you think the live show might be hindered now though since you will have to duplicate the sound of an actual orchestra with just keyboards?

It usually works out pretty, I think. And if it's too many elements of orchestration then we use DAT tapes so we can do it live too. It's no big deal.

How did the Twisted Sister come about?

Basically we are very much into old heavy metal. Twisted Sister is a band we listened to when we were very young and it was very cool to do. It's so typical for black metal bands to do cover songs of old Destruction, Celtic Frost, Venom and stuff like that so we just wanted to pay tribute to the music that we've grown up with. It was a cool thing to do. (laughs).

Some of the songs on "Puritanical Euphoric Misanthropia" sound different from anything done previously. For example "Kings of the Carnival Creation" and "Puritania" have a different feel. Can you give me some information about those tracks?

"Puritania" is a more industrial song. We just wanted to make one song stand out from the other songs because we think it's much more interesting to have a varied songs on an album. Also, for us as musicians, we have to develop and do new things. We did that purpose actually. That song was supposed to be totally different.

I like all your material, but actually those two songs are my two favorite tracks.

Yea, we're going to go in a more industrial direction. It will be more in the "Puritania" style.

It's good to hear bands doing different things. As long as they keep the basis the same, but expand on what they do.

It gets boring, you know? As a musician, it would be very boring to do the same thing every year. Sometimes, it's time to try something new and that's what we are going to work more with in the future.

It seems that the higher a band gets, the more people want to knock them down. And Dimmu Borgir being one of the biggest bands in the black metal scene, how do you deal with all the criticism?

We don't really spend much time thinking about it because we've always been a band who goes our own direction anyway. So if people are accusing us of selling out, then whatever, I don't care what they say anyway.