Silenoz — born in Norway in 1977, given name Sven Atle Kopperud — is Dimmu Borgir's guitarist, co-founder and principal lyricist. He founded the band with Shagrath in 1993 and is, with him, the only element present on the entire discography, from For All Tid (1995) to Grand Serpent Rising (2026). In a band that has gone through dozens of line-up changes, that pair is Dimmu Borgir. His function on guitar is to hold the base on which the orchestral layers are built. Dimmu Borgir lays orchestra, choir and symphonic keyboards over black metal, and the riff has to keep the structure audible beneath all that mass — different work from traditional black metal, where the tremolo guitar occupies the foreground alone. As a lyricist, he is the author of the repertoire's content, which deals with occultism, misanthropy and criticism of organised religion in a deliberately ornate vocabulary — part of the grandiloquent presentation that defines the band. He is also the one who kept the project continuous across three decades: as long as Shagrath and Silenoz remain, Dimmu Borgir exists, regardless of who else is in the line-up.
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