Enslaved return with Mið; album number seventeen shows the Norwegian legends still have plenty to offer well into their fourth decade.
MIÐ
Mið is Old Norse for centre, or middle, and that single word tells you a great deal about how this album differs from the two that came before it. Utgard and Heimdal took their names from a realm and a god respectively- places and figures pulled straight from the mythology. The band have mined since their earliest demos, and both dealt in crossings, thresholds, and rites of passage. Mið names a position rather than a character. Think of it as a hub: one fixed spot with history, myth and the here and now all spoked around it. For a band whose entire catalogue reads like one long journey outward, an album about the fixed point at the heart of things is an intriguing pivot.
The early records: Frost, Eld and Blodhemn were rooted in the raw, frozen fury of the Norwegian second wave, but even then, the band seemed more interested in what the old myths meant than in how they looked on an album sleeve. Mardraum and Monumension cracked the door open to stranger, more psychedelic textures, before Below The Lights, Isa and Ruun pushed the band fully into progressive territory and the Vertebrae, Axioma Ethica Odini and Riitiir run made that hybrid their own. In Times and E brought a warmer, seventies sheen, and Utgard and Heimdal folded in krautrock pulse, jazz-flecked structures, and a more rock-centred directness. Mið, in that light, reads less like a reinvention than a gathering-in, a band taking stock of a vast catalogue and asking what sits at the core of all of it.
FULL WIDESCREEN MODE
Non-Being opens the record, and its title alone makes a pointed statement for an album named after the centre of everything. Starting with absence, with the void before the axis, is a very Enslaved way of laying out a concept; this serves as a mood-setter that gathers mass rather than a sprinter out of the gate. Openers like Behind The Mirror on Heimdal and Fires In The Dark on Utgard have tended to establish the palette of an album as much as they rock out, and this looks set to follow suit.
I Am Ice is where the album’s widest reach first becomes audible. Johan Sara Jr is one of the most celebrated modern exponents of joik, and placing his voice against Enslaved’s frosted riffs and layered keyboards is one of the moments people will be discussing long after release, not least because joik’s circular, chant-like phrasing sits so naturally alongside the folk-derived melodies Bjørnson has always favoured. This gives the album an early sense of place: the far north, the ice, and the old voices of the land, before the sun rises on the track that follows.
Solar Will sees Enslaved in full widescreen mode. Bjornson’s pitch is that the sun, life-giver and potential destroyer in equal measure, is about as big a subject as rock music gets, so it needed riffs of the same scale, John Bonham-style grooves from Sandoy and blazing melodic flourishes, and that is exactly what arrives. It swaggers between lumbering, arena-sized riffs, and bursts of blackened fury, refusing to pick a side for any real length of time, and it is the most immediately physical thing the band have released in years. Kjellson, meanwhile, frames the lyric as a clash between two often-overlooked rivals from the Norse pantheon, whom he deliberately declines to name, leaving the listener to do the detective work.
MOUNTAIN
Mountain sits at the heart of the first half, and on an album so concerned with axes and fixed points, a title like this hardly feels accidental. Norse cosmology gives that role to a tree rather than a peak, but a mountain makes an equally fitting image of something immovable, and is one of the weightiest, most monolithic moments on the album.
Spirit Helper remains the most quietly radical thing here. Kevin Kicking Woman’s contribution gives the song a ceremonial gravity that sets it apart, and he has described it as being about “relationship and responsibility, belonging and accountability.” Rather than grafting a guest voice onto a finished metal track, the arrangement leaves room for him, and the meeting of Blackfoot song tradition with Enslaved’s own mythological framework works because both are treated with equal seriousness. It is the clearest sign yet that this album’s centre is meant to be a meeting point rather than a border.
PARTING
Parting opens the second half, turning the record inward after the expansive guest-led stretch. Enslaved have always been at their most affecting when the bombast drops away; think of the melancholy that runs through much of In Times or E. This leans on Sandoy’s and Vinje’s clean vocals and the more spacious, progressive side of the band’s sound. Coming after the most collaborative stretch of the record, it also looks set to bring the focus back onto the core five, and a title like this rarely signals anything other than reflection, a farewell, perhaps, or the moment of letting go before the album’s final ascent towards its centre.
Tales Of Trees is the progressive heart of the album and arguably the finest moment so far. Kjellson is quick to stress this is no gardening song. For him, trees are a stand-in for the human mind, capable of thriving or of falling into ruin depending on how well they are cared for. Bjørnson leans on the odd-metered folk rhythms and seventies prog wanderlust that run through so much of his songwriting, describing our kinship with trees as “both deeply familiar and wonderfully strange.” The result twists through restless rhythmic changes without ever losing its blackened bite, and it is a reminder that nobody blends these two worlds quite as fluently as Enslaved.
I Midju closes the standard edition and brings the record home to its title. Ending a record named for the centre with a track called in the middle is a lovely conceptual flourish, and Enslaved closers. Think of the way Heimdal or Utgard wound down, have a habit of tying together every thread that came before. If it follows tradition, expect a slow-building, expansive finale that leaves the listener exactly where the album says they are at the centre, looking outward.
A SHARPER FOCUS
What Mið does best is take everything Enslaved have built over the last decade and pull it into sharper focus. The three singles cover deliberately different ground: the cosmic stomp of Solar Will, the ceremonial weight of Spirit Helper, the knotted folk-prog of Tales Of Trees and yet each sounds unmistakably like the same band viewing the same central idea from a different angle. That is no small feat seventeen albums in, when many of their peers from the early nineties have either retreated into nostalgia or wandered so far afield that the connection to their origins has snapped entirely.
It also helps that Kjellson remains one of the most thoughtful lyricists in extreme metal. Where so much Norse-themed metal settles for battle imagery and cosplay, his writing treats mythology as a living toolkit for thinking about the human mind, and his habit of withholding answers, refusing to name the rivals in Solar Will, insisting the tree song is not about trees, invites the listener in rather than lecturing them. That openness carries through to the guest collaborations, which let the Old Norse material share a stage with Sámi and Blackfoot voices on genuinely equal footing.
Mið sounds like a band who know precisely who they are and remain endlessly curious about what else they might become. A seventeenth album built around Bonham-sized grooves, invites a Blackfeet elder and a joik master into the fold and closes the circle on its own title is not the work of a band coasting. Enslaved are still the most compelling place in the room to stand.
Enslaved: Website