A progressive metal band from a small Norwegian industrial town who made four albums in six years, stopped, and came back with a fifth two decades later. The thing that made them worth following is the same in 1991 and in 2020: a singer trained for something else entirely.

The short version

Conception formed in Raufoss in 1989 and released their first album, self-financed, in 1991. Three more followed on the German label Noise between 1993 and 1997, produced by Tommy Newton, with In Your Multitude in 1995 the one their audience ranks highest. The band stopped after Flow; the sources put that at 1997 or 1998. They reunited officially on 30 April 2018, released an EP that November, and made a fifth album, State of Deception, on their own label in 2020, which registered on the Swiss chart.

Raufoss, and a first rehearsal in November 1989

The first rehearsal is dated to 5 November 1989 and the first public performance to 22 December 1990, at the Sentrum Kino in Dokka. The founding line-up had Dag Østby singing, Tore Østby on guitar, Freddy Samsonstuen on bass and Werner Skogli on drums. Arve Heimdal replaced Skogli in 1990 and Ingar Amlien replaced Samsonstuen the same year; Roy Khan replaced Dag Østby in 1991, and from that point the four-piece stayed together for the whole of the 1990s. Note that Tore and Dag Østby are different people and no source states any relationship between them.

A classically trained voice on top of a metal band

Khan came to the band from classical training, and everything Conception did was built on the gap between that and the music underneath it. Tore Østby writes almost all of it, and his guitar writing leaves room for a singer rather than competing with one, which is not the usual arrangement in progressive metal. The keyboards do the rest. Across five albums the keyboard chair changed hands three times, and each change moves the records: two players on the debut, one across the middle three, and a shared arrangement on the fifth.

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Four albums, then nothing for twenty-three years

The gap is the thing everyone knows about Conception, and it is not one gap. The band stopped after Flow in 1997, but they played two one-off shows in 2005 — at ProgPower USA on 16 September and at a Norwegian festival on 1 October — before the permanent return announced in April 2018. Between the announcement and the album came the EP My Dark Symphony in November 2018, which is a separate release from State of Deception and shares no tracks with it. In July 2025 Khan said a few songs had been written for a further record.

What the four of them did in between

What the four of them did in between is well documented. Roy Khan sang for the American band Kamelot from 1997 until April 2011. Tore Østby played in the progressive metal band Ark, whose first album appeared in 1999 with Jørn Lande singing and John Macaluso on drums. Ingar Amlien went on to the extreme metal band Crest of Darkness. Those are the facts; the reasons behind any of it are their own business and are not the subject of these pages.

Album by album

Five studio albums between 1991 and 2020, with twenty-three years between the fourth and the fifth. Tap any title for its guide.

The keyboard chair, and everyone who sat in it

Six people are credited on keyboards across the studio albums. Hans Chr. Gjestvang plays on the first two, alongside Staffan William-Olsson on the debut — though the standard reference dates Gjestvang’s membership from 1992, after the debut, and no source reconciles that with the sleeve. Trond Nagell-Dahl takes over for In Your Multitude and Flow and handles the pre-production on the third album; Halvor Holter served in 1994 without an album credit that has been traced. On State of Deception the work is shared between Tore Østby, Lars Christian Narum on organ and Mellotron, Lars Andre Kvistum on additional keyboards and Michael Rodenberg on orchestration. Kvistum and Aurora Amalie Heimdal have been live members since 2019, and she also sings on the album.

Where to start

Start with In Your Multitude (1995): the highest-rated album they made, the one where the band and the keyboards lock together, and the one the American site Loudwire placed among the best progressive metal records of the 1990s thirty years after the fact. Then Parallel Minds (1993) for the tighter, more melodic version of the same band, and State of Deception (2020) for what they sound like now.

Why they still matter

Conception matter because they built a progressive metal band around a voice rather than around a guitar. The genre was built on instrumental display, and this band built theirs on a voice, then wrote guitar parts that stayed out of its way. A self-released debut and three albums on a German label got them a following in Europe and very little beyond it, and the long gap did the rest of the damage. The records have aged well, and the fifth album made twenty-three years after the fourth suggests the arrangement still works.

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