Enslaved

It’s a rare and remarkable feat that 35 years and now 17 albums in, Enslaved’s horizons still continue to expand. Immune to the familiar rock narratives – the nervous, zeitgeist-chasing detour before the inevitable ‘return to form’, the gradual erosion of a founding urgency or the retracing of past glories – every stage of the Bergen band’s evolution, every new phase entered, has felt like a genuinely organic act of discovery and renewal. Their journey has been at once a commitment to a promise that found its embryonic form in the Norwegian black metal scene they emerged from, and a willingness to challenge both orthodoxy and themselves from the off to make that potential manifest.

Enslaved’s new album, “Mið”, an Old Norse word for ‘centre’, or ‘middle’, marks another departure, and another new beginning.