Mortiis Credit: Claudio Marino

As the 21st century dawned, Håvard Ellefsen was bored. Under his more familiar nom de synth of Mortiis, he had already helped shape the misanthropic sound of Norwegian black metal as bassist for Emperor in the early 1990s and then struck out on a creative quest all his own, shaping the fantastical sub-sub-genre dungeon synth. Armed only with a battery of rudimentary keyboards and orc-ish prosthetic makeup, Mortiis from 1994-1999 created stygian worlds and atmospheres of haunting dread sounding like alternate soundtracks for every Mordor scene in the Lord of the Rings. His music became a cult obsession for both adventurous metalheads and darkly inclined electronic music fans. But by 2000 it just wasn’t enough. He felt hemmed in and ready to leave the dungeon.

What came next surprised even those familiar with the eccentric zigs and zags of Mortiis’ muse. With a head full of Iggy Pop, Skinny Puppy and Nine Inch Nails and dissatisfied with his music to that point, Ellefsen went questing once again. 2001’s The Smell of Rain was the result. This was an album of sleek and undeniable European industrial darkwave featuring distorted guitars, pulsing (modern!) synths, anthemic Wax Traxy choruses and Mortiis even (gasp) singing in a scratchy Peter Murphy-esque baritone. 

“I was definitely getting very disillusioned with the sound and music I had done up until then,” recalls Ellefsen to Orlando Weekly. “I had never really programmed synths or sequencers before, so while I was dissecting NIN and Skinny Puppy songs, trying to figure out how they did things, I was always maneuvering my way around computers, zip drives, SCSI, early plugins and samplers. It was quite overwhelming and out of that came a lot of so-called happy accidents, where cool things just happened, that weren’t necessarily intentional. 

“The biggest happy accident, by far, was the general melodic nature of the album. I wanted the album to sound angrier, more distorted, but I didn’t know how to do it. And in retrospect I think that was for the best.”

The musical and visual reset of The Smell of Rain charted Mortiis on a course toward a bigger audience and broader appeal with successive industrial-tinged albums like The Grudge and the remix album Some Kind of Heroin. All very far away from his dungeon synth past (more on that in a moment), and into the realm of the goth club and even the CBGB’s stage.

The story of The Smell of Rain was not quite finished, though. As he worked on upcoming album, Ghosts of Europa — due out this summer — Ellefsen began hearing whispers and hidden connections with The Smell of Rain in the DNA of this music. And with a 25th anniversary nearing, maybe it was time for this morbid multitasker to revisit “Era 2” alongside his new music.

“I guess while working on the Ghosts of Europa album sowed the early seeds in terms of revisiting this sound, it just felt like this music would morph well with songs from The Smell of Rain,” explains Ellefsen.

This will not be the first time Ellefsen has taken a deep dive into his musical past. In 2020, buoyed by rabid interest from a new generation of fans turned on to the intimate yet ambitious “Era 1” dungeon synth albums, Mortiis revisited this work both live and in the studio. He explains it’s all down to a matter of instinct.

“I always tended to go a lot more by gut feeling, or just what feels right for me artistically. I don’t do, never really did, that slightly more cynical thing, where you look at market demands and where the money is at what time. I just always went with what feels right as in, ‘What do I want to do now?’” he adds. “Ghosts of Europa probably leans more towards albums like Smell of Rain — to a limited degree — and that played into a bit as well, as it’s just easier to segue from one of those songs into something off of The Smell of Rain, for example. The time was just right, really.”

The timing is, indeed, right with 2026 marking the quarter-century anniversary of The Smell of Rain and Mortiis marking the occasion with darkling dance parties all around the United States. He’s currently on a co-headlining tour with avant-black metallers Uada, neofolk act Rome and newer dungeon-dweller Wraith Knight.

“We’re doing a lot of songs from The Smell of Rain and some other stuff that we haven’t done in a while, plus songs off of the upcoming Ghosts of Europa album, and people seem to connect well with it,” he says. “I tried to plan out the setlist in a way that dynamically makes sense, where there’s this sense of accumulating energy as the show moves along.”

Though the set is heavily focused on the Rain songs, the song selection is a satisfying mix of past and present, evidenced by new Depeche Mode-leaning set opener “Ghosts of Europa,” freshly released as a single a few weeks ago, and even a song or two from The Great Deceiver. Unlike the Era 1 tours, Mortiis will be stepping out from behind his keyboard banks as frontman, flanked by drummer Jon Siren (Hate Dept., IAMX) and guitarist Ashes (Wednesday 13). 

With so many memories doubtless tied into an album that — quite literally — changed his musical life, we ask about feelings of déjà vu onstage when revisiting these songs nightly. There’s even a prescient lyric on Rain’s “Everyone Leaves”  — “I’m going back, thinking about all the changes. / I’m going back to all those wasted years” — is it ever overwhelming?

“Now that I’m a few shows in, I feel like I’m back in 2010 or something, like nothing ever changed, which I am thankful for,” he says. “I was a little worried it would take the whole tour for my stowed-away memories to really sort of reawaken again. I certainly have a lot of memories from these songs, but I think I did most of my reminiscing while practicing, prior to the tour, like while recording the vocals for the album I got locked out of the studio and had to break a window to get back in!”

Come Sunday, you — much like Ellefsen — can get both lost in the reverie and stomp along to some industrial-strength bangers. No 12- sided dice allowed.

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This article appears in April 29-May 5, 2026.