This is what we fans have been able to stitch together from published interviews, podcasts (thank you, Gammal Maiden), livestreams and other sources. All errors are on us, not the band.
A town where everybody seemed to be in a band
If you grew up in Notodden around the turn of the millennium, ending up in a band was apparently just what happened to you.
Einar's older sister, Heidi Solberg, and her husband Vegard Tveitan, Ihsahn of Emperor fame, were right at the centre of that scene. TorO has said in an interview that for a teenager in Notodden at that time, the question was not “Should I play in a band?”. It was “Which band should I play in, and which instrument?”.
A surprising number of the musicians who came out of Notodden around that time are still working professionally in music today. It isn't a big town, so they were clearly doing something right.
Einar and TorO knew each other from kindergarten, but it was music, not childhood friendship, that pulled them into the same band. Einar was already singing in a punk band, after initially learning the trumpet on his mother's insistence that he had to learn an instrument. Singing came later, and oh boy! was that the right choice. TorO had picked up a guitar for the first time around Christmas 2000, an old acoustic he'd found in the attic. He taught himself off tabs he found online, the way you did back then. He then joined Einar's band on a newly acquired electric guitar the summer before they started at videregående (upper secondary school).
For a while they played covers of simple punk/rock songs, using the few power chords they knew. One day someone found the word "leprous" in a dictionary. It was a suitably grim, biblical sounding name for a disease, and the guys thought it was a cool name for a band. Hence Leprous was born.
Their first-ever show was at a youth club in Notodden around Christmas 2001. Somewhere in that set, they played Judas Priest's Breaking the Law. Twice.
Later they participated in UKM (Ungdommens kulturmønstring, "Youth Culture Showcase") and NM i Rock ("Norwegian Rock Championship"), and made it to the UKM national final, which, if you've never been a teenager doing UKM, was a very big deal indeed.
The two who kept going
The early lineup was anything but stable. Guitarists, bassists and drummers came and went, and Leprous went through several versions of itself before it looked anything like a "real" band.
Two people kept turning up: Einar and TorO.
When somebody left, they found somebody else. When one version of the band ran its course, they built another. The lineup kept changing, but Einar and TorO simply kept going. Turns out stubbornness is a pretty useful quality.
And here's a fun one: 25 years later, Leprous remains TorO's first, last and only band.
Where the sound started coming from
Back then, the influences were easy to spot. Judas Priest was an early favourite. Coming from Notodden, Ihsahn and Emperor were of course part of the mix. And Ihsahn didn't just live down the road, he gave TorO the only guitar lessons he has ever had.
Beyond that, Opeth were a major influence — Einar has talked about wearing out Ghost Reveries at the time — alongside Porcupine Tree, The Mars Volta and Pain of Salvation, while King Crimson was a band that Einar deep dived into. Line up Ghost Reveries' opener, Ghost of Perdition, next to Passing, the song that would open Leprous' own first album, and you can hear some of what young Leprous were absorbing: long-form prog metal, dark harmonies, vocals that swing between clean and growled, and a habit of taking sudden left turns mid-song.
Before album number one
Those influences soon found their way onto tape. Silent Waters arrived in 2004, a three-song demo from a band still working out exactly what it wanted to be.
Two years later came the far more ambitious Aeolia. Nine tracks and over an hour of music makes “demo” a pretty generous description for it — in practice, it was their first real attempt at a full album, even if it never really got an official release.
But Leprous were already looking ahead. Instead of holding onto music they felt they were outgrowing, they just kept writing new material.
Long before Malina, Pitfalls or Melodies of Atonement, that instinct — keep moving, don't get too attached to what you just made — was already there.
Ready to make it official
By the end of 2008, Leprous had lived through a lot more history than their official discography let on.
They'd grown up inside Notodden's small but unreasonably productive music scene, survived more lineup changes than anyone was probably still counting, played UKM and NM i Rock, and quietly recorded two albums' worth of material almost nobody outside their circle had actually heard.
By then, Einar and TorO had been keeping Leprous alive for seven years.
This time, the recording was not going to end up as another demo.
It became Tall Poppy Syndrome.
Recorded in August 2008 and released in May 2009, Tall Poppy Syndrome finally turned years of rehearsing, writing and lineup changes into an official debut album.
And after all that time spent figuring out where Leprous might go, the first thing anyone actually heard from them was a song called Passing. Kind of perfect, when you think about it.
