Behind The Artworks: Einherjer - Lifeblood (2026)
The artwork for Lifeblood was created by Costin Chioreanu, and it reflects many of the same ideas that run through the album: continuity, heritage, roots and the forces that remain with us through time.
When we started working on Lifeblood, we kept returning to the idea that the past never really disappears. It becomes part of us. It is carried through generations, through memory, instinct, culture and the places we come from. That is essentially what the title Lifeblood means to us – something that keeps flowing.
Costin took those ideas and created his own visual interpretation of them.
The central creature in the artwork is the Dragon – a recurring symbol in Einherjer's world and something that reaches all the way back through our history as a band. Here it doesn't appear as a conventional dragon. It seems to rise out of the landscape itself, almost as if it has always been there beneath the surface.
Running through it are red branching forms that resemble both blood vessels and roots. That duality fits the album perfectly. Blood represents what is carried within us, while roots connect us to where we came from. They are two ways of expressing the same idea.
Above it all are the eyes looking into infinity. Costin describes these as the eyes of the Einherjer spirit. For us, that makes the image connect not only with the themes of the album, but with the history of the band itself. More than thirty years have passed since we started Einherjer, and a lot has changed along the way, but there is something at the core that has remained the same.
The landscape and the water are important parts of that as well. We come from the west coast of Norway, from Haugesund and the ancient sea route through Karmsundet. The sea has shaped this place and the people living here for thousands of years. On Lifeblood, the sea, the tides and the narrow straits became natural symbols for the deeper currents connecting past and present.
There is a line in Dei Så Ser that captures another part of this idea:
“Me e stammen, dei e rot” – “We are the tree, they are the roots.”
We are only the latest chapter in a much longer story.
That's what I see when I look at Costin's artwork. The dragon, the roots, the blood, the water and the Einherjer spirit above it all are connected. Something ancient remains alive beneath the surface, flowing from what came before into what comes next.
That's Lifeblood.
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