Mortemia: Collaborative Gothic Metal Reimagines a Classic Through ‘The Cover Collab Sessions’

On June 27, 2025, a storm of a peculiar nature made landfall in the digital world. It arrived not with wind and rain, but with the crush of distorted guitars, the sweep of a symphony orchestra, and a voice of operatic power. This tempest was ‘Like a Hurricane,’ the new single from Mortemia, the long-running solo project of the Norwegian musician Morten Veland. The song, a cover of the raw 1977 Neil Young classic, is more than a simple reinterpretation; it is an act of audacious translation, transmuting the desperate, frayed-nerve energy of rock and roll into the grand, melancholic architecture of modern gothic metal.

This release is not merely a new track, but a cultural signifier within its rarefied world. It marks the first glimpse of a new album, ‘The Cover Collab Sessions,’ and continues a fascinating new chapter for a project that was dormant for over a decade. For ‘Like a Hurricane,’ Veland is joined by the formidable Dutch soprano Dianne van Giersbergen, formerly of the German band Xandria and now the force behind her own projects, Dianne and Ex Libris. Their collaboration is the latest in a series that has redefined Mortemia, transforming it from a vessel of absolute solitude into a nexus of communal artistry.

To listen to the music of Morten Veland is to engage with a particular, and particularly European, strain of sorrow. It is a profound and theatrical gloom, one that feels less like fleeting sadness and more like a permanent state of being. It is a mood that, to a French ear, resonates with a specific literary heritage: the deep, existential ennui that Charles Baudelaire termed le spleen. Veland, a solitary architect of these elaborate sonic cathedrals of sorrow, has spent three decades giving voice to this feeling. With ‘Like a Hurricane,’ he has summoned his most potent storm yet, one that is both a tribute to a song he has “loved since I was a kid” and a bold new statement from one of gothic metal’s most enduring and uncompromising auteurs.

The Mortemia Experiment

Mortemia first emerged in 2009, a project born from a surplus of creativity. Veland found himself writing music that was “too complex, too hard, or did not have the right expression” for the increasingly melodic direction of his main band, Sirenia. Rather than discard these darker, more intricate ideas, he created a new outlet for them. The result was the 2010 album ‘Misere Mortem,’ a work that was both a return to his roots and a stark departure from his concurrent work.

The defining concept of this first incarnation of Mortemia was its most conspicuous absence: there were no female lead vocals. This was a deliberate choice, an intentional move to create a sound that could not be mistaken for Sirenia or his past with Tristania. Instead, the vocal landscape of ‘Misere Mortem’ was a dramatic interplay between Veland’s own extreme growls and massive, sonorous choral arrangements, which he traveled to France to record.

He performed and programmed every instrument himself, producing, engineering, and mixing the entire album alone. Mortemia, in its original form, was the ultimate expression of his artistic solitude—a dialogue only with himself and a hired, anonymous choir.

For eleven years, that was where the story ended. The project lay dormant as Veland focused on a steady stream of Sirenia albums and tours. Then, the world stopped. The COVID-19 pandemic of 2020 brought the global touring industry to a halt, and suddenly, Veland found himself with an unexpected abundance of time. It was the perfect opportunity to resurrect Mortemia, but the same crisis that provided the time also created a significant logistical hurdle: international travel was impossible, making a trip to France to record choirs “too complicated.”

This constraint became the catalyst for a radical reinvention. Faced with the impossibility of realizing the project’s old model, Veland devised a new one, turning a logistical problem into a brilliant artistic concept. He would replace the anonymous choirs with a series of distinct, celebrated guest vocalists, each contributing to a single track.

The pandemic, an event defined by global isolation, paradoxically transformed Mortemia from a project of absolute solitude into a vehicle for widespread collaboration. The very conditions that forced musicians off the road and into their home studios also made dozens of the metal world’s most talented singers available for remote work.

Beginning in May 2021, Veland launched ‘The Pandemic Pandemonium Sessions,’ a series of digital singles released through his own label, Veland Music. The project that was born from a desire for creative isolation was reborn, through forced physical isolation, as a celebration of community.

The list of collaborators reads like a who-is-who of female-fronted metal, including Liv Kristine (ex-Theatre of Tragedy), Melissa Bonny (Ad Infinitum), Brittney Slayes (Unleash the Archers), and many more. This was followed by more releases under the banner of ‘The Covid Aftermath Sessions,’ and now, ‘The Cover Collab Sessions,’ continuing this new, vibrant, and fundamentally inverted identity for the project.

‘Like a Hurricane’: A Classic Reimagined

The Mortemia version is a fascinating work of translation. The original’s minimalist, almost hypnotic structure is exploded into a maximalist, symphonic epic. The core melody is still present, but it is now buttressed by layers of orchestral strings, pounding double-bass drums, and Veland’s signature heavily distorted guitar riffs. The song’s essential feeling of lovelorn chaos is not lost, but magnified, transformed from an intimate confession into a Wagnerian drama.

At the heart of this transformation is the vocal interplay. Veland’s guttural, almost demonic growls deliver the verses with a sense of torment and rage, a stark contrast to Dianne van Giersbergen’s soaring, operatic delivery of the iconic chorus. Her voice, powerful and pristine, cuts through the metallic fury like a beacon in a storm.

It is the quintessential “beauty and the beast” dynamic that Veland helped popularize decades ago, now deployed with masterful precision on a classic rock canvas. As van Giersbergen herself noted, she was ready to become a “vocal hurricane… to stir the storm and leave a trail of symphonic power in our wake.”

The accompanying music video, while sparse, serves as a powerful visual metaphor for the song and its creation. It presents Veland and van Giersbergen as elemental forces, set against stark, windswept backdrops. There is a recurring visual motif of destruction and renewal, of breaking and mending. This visual narrative has resonated with viewers, with one online commenter cryptically but astutely describing the aesthetic as, “A modern version of Marika the Eternal. A breaker, and a restorer.” This reference to a key figure from the video game ‘Elden Ring’—a queen who shatters a divine artifact to upend her world—provides a potent interpretive lens.

This act of breaking and restoring is precisely what Veland does with the song itself. He breaks the Neil Young original down to its elemental emotional core and then restores it in his own grand, gothic image.

Le Spleen Gothique: Mortemia in the Modern Age

In the fragmented landscape of twentieth-first-century metal, the term “gothic metal” has become a broad, often nebulous catch-all, encompassing everything from doom-laden dirges to pop-inflected symphonic rock.

Morten Veland stands as a vital through-line in this history. He is a living bridge connecting the genre’s disparate threads: from the brooding melancholy of its British pioneers, the “Peaceville Three” (Paradise Lost, My Dying Bride, Anathema), to the “beauty and the beast” symphonics he helped forge, and now to the digitally-driven, collaborative model of the new Mortemia.

From a French perspective, his work resonates with our own long traditions of grappling with the sublime and the macabre. His musical compositions can be seen as analogues to the great Gothic cathedrals of France. The soaring orchestrations and ethereal female vocals are the massive stone arches and vaulted ceilings, reaching for the heavens. But this heavenly aspiration is anchored to the earth by the immense weight and power of the metal elements: the driving, heavily-downtuned guitar riffs and the relentless percussion are the essential iron reinforcements—the chaînage—that medieval builders used to bind the stone together, providing the tensile strength necessary to keep the entire magnificent, ambitious structure from collapsing under its own weight. Without the metal, the symphony would drift away; without the symphony, the metal would be mere noise. It is the tension between them that creates the sublime.

Yet, the most profound connection lies not in architecture, but in literature. The thematic core of Veland’s entire oeuvre—his relentless lyrical focus on death, pain, despair, inner struggles, and depression—is a perfect musical expression of a uniquely French cultural concept: le spleen.

Popularized in the nineteenth century by the poet Charles Baudelaire, spleen is not simply sadness or melancholy. It is a deeper, more profound state: a causeless anguish, a disgust with the vulgarity of life, a spiritual apathy and existential boredom that becomes an all-consuming aesthetic. In his collection ‘Le Spleen de Paris,’ Baudelaire explored the darker aspects of the modern urban soul, finding a strange, decadent beauty in misery and alienation.

Veland operates as a modern Baudelairian figure. His characterization of his music as a channel for dark emotions and his stated disinterest in writing “positive happy tunes” echo the spirit of the decadent poets. His lyrical world is one of perpetual twilight, populated by the same themes of loss, mortality, and psychological torment that obsessed nineteenth-century romantic and symbolist writers.

Mortemia, in this light, is not just gothic metal. It is spleen set to a bombastic, cathartic, and defiantly beautiful score. It is the sound of a nineteenth-century soul navigating the anxieties of the twentieth-first.

Conclusion

With the release of ‘Like a Hurricane,’ the stage is set for the full album, ‘The Cover Collab Sessions,’ which will feature 12 different singers interpreting 12 different songs. It promises to be a unique entry in Veland’s discography, a project focused on interpretation rather than pure invention. Yet, as this first single demonstrates, even when reinterpreting the work of others, his own artistic signature remains indelible. The album will be a testament to his ability to absorb and transform, to make any sound entirely his own.

As interest in the project resurges, it is crucial to clarify its nature. Despite Veland’s early hopes of one day taking Mortemia on the road, it remains, for now, a studio-only entity with no upcoming concerts planned. Online searches often create confusion, conflating Mortemia with the Danish electronic DJ “Morten” or the fellow Norwegian metal artist Mortiis, both of whom have active tour schedules. Fans hoping to see these new collaborative pieces performed live will, for the foreseeable future, have to be content with the recorded versions.

Mortemia thus endures as a project of fascinating and evolving contradictions. It is the intensely personal work of a solitary master, now defined by its spirit of open collaboration. It is a nostalgic journey back to the darker, more complex roots of gothic metal, yet it innovates with its modern, digitally-focused release strategy. It is the sound of one man’s unquiet, unwavering vision—a vision that, after thirty years, has not softened or faded, but has instead learned to channel new storms, proving that even in the most melancholic of creative worlds, there is still an immense capacity for change, communion, and the sublime, terrifying beauty of a hurricane.