In the cold, beautiful Scandinavia in the small country Denmark, HELHORSE started out as 5 piece stoner, sludge band under the name of DØDNING in 2006.
Experimenting with the sound the band added their second vocalist Mikkel Wad Larsen later the same year.
The members are all set in Copenhagen, but come from very different musical backgrounds.
And so with a wide spread of influences from metal, hardcore, punk, and rock and roll, the band found that this diversity was one of their greatest assets.
With only two songs on MySpace, the band were thrown to the wolves.
In 2007 they played support slots for bands like Black Label Society, Exodus, Opeth, 3 Inches of Blood and set out on their first tour abroad in The Netherlands.
The reaction received at the various shows was overwhelming and fuelled the need to record their fist self titled EP “DØDNING” which was released in the spring of 2009. Besides the release of their first EP, 2009 also marked an important change in the band.
Bass player Jon Kampstrup made the decision to leave the band and he was replaced by Søren Nybo Hansen.
With the new line up the guys started writing material for their debut album.
In late 2009 they started recording their debut album at the Dead Rat Studio with Danish metal legend Jacob Bredahl (HateSphere, As We Fight, Purified In Blood).
With a crisp, warm and dynamic sound, Jacob Bredahl managed to get the very best of the band and created a very powerful debut album that shows a band breaking into their own right.
2010 was a year of preparation, concerts and self reflexion.
Due to the past three years the band took a look inside and started to work on their visual identity and expression as a band. The result of this process was to change their name from DØDNING to HELHORSE.
“We felt that it was necessary to change our name to something that was more linked to our musical expression. But at the same time we didn’t want to lose the meaning of DØDNING (ghost/goblin in Danish). We found a poem from an old famous Danish writer Steen Steensen Blicher in which the Helhorse (ghost horse) was mentioned as the bringer of death and destruction.
We feel that HELHORSE is the perfect name for us as it embraces our Nordic roots.”
The future looks bright for the bastard sons of Copenhagen. They will release their debut album For Wolves And Vultures in the late winter of 2010.
Spirits of The Dead consists of Ole Øvstedal (guitars), Ragnar Vikse (vocals), Geir Thorstensen (drums) and Deadly Nightshade (bass, keyboards) The band was formed by Ole and Ragnar early 2007, and later joined by Geir and Deadly Nightshade.
Trying to capture the magic of the force building up between the four of them, they immediately went to the studio with sketches and ideas about the how they wanted the band to sound. After only 6 intensive days in the Crystal Canyon Studio, they had the result. Mixed in Grand Sport Studio a week after, and then mastered in Cutting Room, Sweden. They used the demo to tour Scandinavia (without a single release), and got great feedback from all over Europe and was picked out to play NXNE in Toronto.
They went into the studio again to record the songs again plus a couple more. They wanted to raise the bars even higher. The debut Album was recorded and mixed in Grand Sport Studios by Christian Engfeldt and mastered in Sterling Sound,New York by George Marino (of Led Zeppelin and Jimi Hendrix fame)
With a foot planted in beloved magic of the sixties and seventies and adding a portion of their longing souls for the fjords and mountains back home on the west coast of Norway,the nearest comparison musically would be something like psychedelic-stoner-folk-rock. (It’s impossible to fully make an impression of the music with only words, so the best would be to check out their music on the cd or myspace).
