REVELATIONS
Every day, between 5pm and 5.05pm, Leprous frontman Einar Solberg allows himself five minutes to research whatever has been bothering him. Then he gets on with his evening. It’s a coping mechanism he’s established to deal with long-term health anxiety – something Prog spoke to him about in summer 2019, before the release of the brilliant, lyrically bleak Pitfalls album.
“I postpone my thoughts, basically,” he explains over Zoom, at home in Norway with his cat, Pixel. “It sounds so silly and simple, but it’s extremely efficient. Things fade away and prove themselves to be completely irrelevant.”
It’s a technique he’s been using, along with therapy, since the beginning of the year. He wanted to make a change in his life – to get a handle on the anxiety that he felt had a handle on him. “I had one New Year’s Resolution for 2021, and it was to work with my anxiety, to not let it dominate my life anymore,” he says. “And it’s been working very well, so far.”
Leprous have steadily marked a particularly big artistic leap. It saw them push their progressive metal sound even further, upping their dramatic dynamics and bringing in more electronic accents, culminating in an epic, experimental closer, . It was also clearly the sound of a man battling his demons, and when we spoke back then, Solberg alluded to some unspoken early trauma that had clawed its way to the surface.
