Satyricon: When K.I.N.G. Hit a Fashion Show
Satyricon played 'K.I.N.G.' (2006) on a fashion catwalk at the 2011 Nordic World Ski Championships — a booking Satyr calls 'bizarre'.
Satyricon performed their 2006 single K.I.N.G., from the album Now, Diabolical (released April 2006), on a fashion catwalk during the 2011 Nordic World Ski Championships — a move vocalist Sigurd “Satyr” Wongraven now calls baffling.
What happened
The Oslo black-metal duo were invited onto a produced runway segment for the championships, staged by NRK. In an interview with Metal Hammer, Wongraven described the booking as out of left field and said, "I have no idea who came up with the idea!" He suggested the organisers might have been trying to pair two things seen as distinctively Norwegian — skiing and black metal — for an international audience, but he still sounded mystified by the fashion-show framing.
Why fans should care
K.I.N.G. is more than a novelty in Satyricon's catalogue: it anchored the band’s 2006 shift toward stripped-down, riff-led songwriting on Now, Diabolical. The album reached number two on the Norwegian charts and K.I.N.G. has become Satyricon’s most-played track on streaming platforms, registering 19,800,000 Spotify streams at the time of publication — roughly double their next most popular song. The single’s heavy, groove-driven approach marked a conscious move away from keyboards and technical drum passages, favouring a signature riff to carry the songs.
Then and now
Satyricon have continued to experiment: their 2022 release Satyricon & Munch was a single, hour-long atmospheric piece created as a soundtrack to an exhibition at Oslo’s Edvard Munch Museum. Wongraven has since indicated the band’s next record will return to a more conventional album form while embracing variety in style and mood.
The band will tour Europe from September to November, opening at the Floyd venue in Athens on September 18. They’ll support Dimmu Borgir at Oslo Spektrum on October 31 with Enslaved opening, and headline Damnation festival in Manchester on November 8. For fans, the runway oddity is a reminder: Satyricon still court surprise — and K.I.N.G. still hits hard, live or strutting down a catwalk.
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