Solefald is a Norwegian avant-garde metal/black metal band that was formed by members Lars Are "Lazare" Nedland and Cornelius Jakhelln in August 1995, with Nedland singing and playing keyboard/synthesizer/piano and drums, and Jakhelln singing and playing guitar and bass. The duo experiment with a wide array of musical styles, frequently work on other projects, and rarely perform live under the Solefald name, leading them to describe themselves as "two stubborn goats pretending to be a band." According to the duo, their name is an Old Norse word for "sunset," taken from one of Theodor Kittelsen's paintings illustrating a poem of the same name by Theodor Caspari, published in the 1901 book Vintereventyr.

Their first official rehearsal together was in 1995 with the song "When The Moon Is On The Wave." They released their first, 5 song demo, entitled Jernlov (translated to Iron Law in English), in 1996. Jernlov was the band's most traditional black metal release, but the band had an experimental edge, incorporating Nedland's clean vocals and piano passages into the black metal formula. They were one of the first bands in the black metal genre to incorporate new elements into the style, including a bag pipe passage in one song.

The band was signed by the Milanese record label, Avantgarde Music, in 1996. In July 1997, the band released a follow-up to their demo. This first full-length release was called, The Linear Scaffold. The album was an expansion of the style on the demo. The album had a better recording quality, and contained 8 songs, two of which had previously been on the demo, but were now re-written and re-recorded. The band incorporated sounds and techniques that had never been heard in black metal before, using hand claps along with choruses in the song "Philosophical Revolt", jazzy clean guitar passages, and shrieked vocals over piano pieces. The album also featured vocals in English and Norwegian. When this album was released, the band coined the term "Red Music With Black Edges" to define themselves.

In 1998 the band began to adventure out of the studio and onto their first and only tour. The band toured through Europe supporting symphonic metal band Haggard with gothic metal band Tristania. Being a two-piece band, they employed the use of John Erik Jacobsen (aka Didrik von PanzerDanzer) on second guitar, who recently toured with, then joined, Jakhelln' new band Sturmgeist. Drummer Tarald Lie and ex-Dimmu Borgir member Jens-Petter Sandvik on the bass completed Solefald's live line-up. A press statement released in July 2012 announced Solefald's return to the stage for two festival dates, first on 15 September 2012 at the Southern Discomfort festival in Kristiansand, Norway and the second at the 2013 Inferno Festival in Oslo. Session instrumental support for both concerts will be handled by Norwegian death metal band, In Vain.

Starting in 1998 the two members started branching out into other musical endeavours, with Nedland performing the drums for the album Black Shining Leather by the Norwegian black metal band Carpathian Forest. Later, in July 1999, Jakhelln did guest vocals for the gothic metal band Monumentum for the songs "Black And Violet", a cover of the Italian band Death SS, and "The Colour of Compassion". These recordings were released in 2004 on the Monumentum compilation album, Metastasi.

In 1999, the band released their second full-length, entitled Neonism on 24 September. The album incorporated black metal, pop, classical music, punk, and progressive metal. The album also featured more vocal techniques from each member. Singing in English and French, Nedland brought back his clean vocals, but also introduced a new style, in the form of hollering. Jakhelln still used his high pitched wails and shrieks and his lower grunting, but he also introduced a style of spoken word singing. The lyrics were unconventional for metal in general and black metal especially, dealing with socio-political issues and pop culture criticism. The album received mixed reviews, with some criticizing it for being too adventurous. The band even received a death threat from the USA from someone that considered the album an abomination to black metal. Others denounced it for its thin recording quality. The band stated that they used this quality because of the multi-layered song structures demanding a thinner sound to allow the many facets of the music to shine through. Another reasoning was that they wanted to use the recording style at the famed Sunlight Studios to achieve the "old school black metal" sound. The album's recording was also plagued with problems, including a mixing board that literally started burning. The band coined the term "Radical Designer Rock 'n' Roll", for this release.

Following this album, the Solefald camp grew quiet for a little while. Nedland joined progressive black metal band Borknagar as keyboard player and back-up vocalist. In 2000, Borknagar released their first release with Nedland playing with them, Quintessence.

In 2001, Solefald came together to release their third full-length. The new album, entitled Pills Against the Ageless Ills, was described by the band as "a concept album about a pair of long-lost brothers — one a pornographer, the other a monk." Musically, Pills is more straightforward than Neonism. The album features more prominent guitar, with the keys acting as an accent and background instrument much of the time. Whereas Neonism consisted of songs that would each have a variety of styles and genres within them, Pills has a variety of different style songs, each focusing individually on a certain style. Vocally, the band had made yet another change. Maintaining Nedland's style and getting rid of his hollering style singing, and keeping Jakhelln' lower black metal grunting, "Pills" saw the addition of a less high pitched black metal shriek from Jakhelln, as well as Jakhelln' most common style of singing to date. This new vocal style is a throaty sounding form of vocals, similar to some gothic rock bands. This album, released on 19 September 2001, was Solefald's first album released through the German record label Century Media.