We didn't work on it as a concept album, especially not lyrically, but we worked the whole album together musically as a concept. Omnio was the first album we did as an entirety somehow, we composed and rehearsed the songs in the same kind of tracklisting that's present on the album, that was the first album we made as an entirety instead of just a set of individual songs. Lyrically, we didn't try to come up with a concept, but looking back at it now, there seems to be a very red thread going through the whole thing in a way. I think it's very introspective in a way, deals a lot with philosophical questions and a lot of things that are written between the lines, so there's a lot of questioning on that album, questioning why things are the way they are, trying to understand the bottom of yourself.
- Jan "Ovl" Svithjod / In the Woods... interview, Chronicles of Chaos, 1999
IN THE WOODS... released Omnio, their second album, once again through British label Misanthropy, on this day (possibility; see below) in 1997.
The first song was very much based upon an experience of going out at night and looking at the stars. A lot of people walk around on planet Earth with their noses high up in the sky and I think the only way to pull them down again from doing that is to push them out on a starry night and see how big it all is and reduce the person to nothing almost. A lot of this questioning was present on that one.
- Jan "Ovl" Svithjod / In the Woods... interview, Chronicles of Chaos, 1999
As the lyrics changed quite a lot from the first album to Omnio, the vocals and the music changed a lot - the vocals had to go in the same direction, I thought. Concerning the lyrics, they had to be expressed in a totally different way from what we were dealing with in the debut album. I think we managed to still keep the balance of the very heavy parts and the very slow parts, but we did the vocals in another way. For the slow parts, we had low kind of melodious vocals and on the heavier parts we did heavier vocals, which are also present on some parts of the new album. I just wanted to try and come up with something different vocal-wise and just see what comes out of it and do it more personally somehow, make it sound like something individual and not really just a copy of anything else.
- Jan "Ovl" Svithjod / In the Woods... interview, Chronicles of Chaos, 1999
Note regarding the release date: there are alternatives, depending on the source, including 14 October.