THE KOVENANT:A BRILLIANT CHAT WITH NAGASH PRE-AUSTRALIAN ANNIHILATION.
THE KOVENANT: NAGASH ON THE FIRST AUSTRALIAN SHOWS, NEXUS POLARIS, AND THIRTY-ODD YEARS OF REFUSING TO SIT STILL
THE KOVENANT: A BRILLIANT CHAT WITH NAGASH PRE-AUSTRALIAN ANNIHILATION.
The Kovenant don't do things the easy way. Formed in Hamar, Norway, back in '92 as Covenant, the band spent the '90s helping build the vocabulary of symphonic black metal before deliberately walking away from it — dragging cosmic themes, industrial machinery and neo-classical guitar work into a sound nobody had a name for yet, until Nagash and Psy Coma just made one up: Progressive Space Metal. Whether that label still fits thirty-odd years on is one thing; whether chasing it has been worth it is another question entirely, and it's clear from talking to Nagash that the answer is an easy yes. Three decades, several line-ups, a full-blown resurrection and one dispute-forced name change later, they're still the band other bands get compared to when nothing else quite fits.
What they've never done, in all that time, is play Australia. That changes this September, with two exclusive shows — Melbourne's Max Watts on the 18th, Sydney's Crowbar on the 19th — built around a full front-to-back performance of Nexus Polaris. Nearly thirty years on from release, the album's been canonised as one of the genre's genuine landmarks, and for Nagash it's less a time capsule than a record he's still very much living inside. But don't mistake this for a nostalgia lap: alongside the Nexus Polaris set, the band are loading in a machine-gun run through the rest of the catalogue too, industrial-metal era included, so anyone walking in expecting one mode of The Kovenant is getting the full arsenal instead. For a band that's spent its whole existence refusing to be pinned down, letting Australian crowds hear the entire spread in one night — closing a gap thirty-plus years in the making — feels like the right way to finally show up.
Ahead of the run, we caught original member Nagash — vocals, bass, one of the two people who invented the term Progressive Space Metal in the first place — for twenty minutes down the line from Norway. He was exactly what you'd hope: unfiltered, endlessly enthusiastic, still talking about the genre like a fan first and a veteran second. Here's what he had to say:
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