Enslaved: Towards The Dawn
ENSLAVED might just be one of the most fascinating black metal bands to exist. Not least because while they started off in black metal, over the course of their last sixteen albums, they’ve charted a course almost entirely away from the genre and into the realms of mind-expanding progressive metal. The extremity isn’t gone, at all; it’s just been bent and reshaped into brand new, more exciting forms that delve into prog, thrash, even psychedelia at times. Perhaps the biggest surprise is that they’ve not only done this, but retained a core group of fans that have stuck with them since the 1990s, as well as picking up legions of new ones for whom ENSLAVED might just be the heaviest band they listen to if their entry point was the far more progressive material.
“Grutle [Kjellson, bass/vocals/synths] and Ivar [Bjørnson, guitar/synths/vocals] always claimed there’s no master plan, and they go by instinct,” drummer Iver Sandøy explains when we sit down to talk all things Heimdal, their 16th studio album. He continues, “there must’ve been something in that initial sound and scope that the fans who’ve always been there caught onto, something that still resonates now, and they’re in it for the journey.” To hear him tell it, musical taste in the band has always been more eclectic but it perhaps took a bit longer for that taste to fully develop, or at least perhaps for the band’s own music to evolve to a point where it made sense to begin introducing it.
PINK FLOYD, for instance, as well as the German electronica and Krautrock scenes have always influenced the band; “not necessarily always in the sound, but in the way of thinking about arrangements, having a broader scope and embracing monotony at times too. That comes from the minimalist electronica as much as it does heavy metal,” Sandøy explains. Their vast sonic horizons aren’t anything new; in the mid-2000s they saw perhaps their biggest stylistic shift, notably on 2004’s Isa and 2006’s Ruun. The inclusion of sharper dynamic shifts and prog turns has only expanded since then, as has their drive to explore new sonic pastures. “Several of us are pushing 50,” Sandøy explains. “Obviously we want to hear something different than when we were 17. We’re all music fans, seeking out new stuff and expanding our own record collections, and that’s what ENSLAVED has always been about.”
Heimdal itself is another shift from its predecessor Utgard, notably in its often thrashier direction hinted at on 2021 EP Caravans To The Outer Worlds, the title track of which makes an appearance here. While the black metal roots do still show themselves, it’s a far more expansive, often psychedelic journey that we’re taken on and one that they’re well aware can seem incongruous. “With Ivar’s compositions, you can never predict what will work,” grins Sandøy, “you have a blastbeat with a soaring clean vocal on top, and somehow that works!” Unlike Utgard, Heimdal was a more solitary affair in writing; the band were often unable to write together, resulting in the album feeling, at least to Sandøy, like Bjørnson’s album more than anything – but that’s no bad thing. “The writing was coloured by the pandemic, definitely,” he agrees. “[Ivar] was stuck and he fell into a cauldron of sorts coming up with the songs; a lot of the stuff, especially that the drums are doing that he programmed, I had no desire to change.”
Thematically, it’s much akin to their ongoing focus on Norse mythology, as evidenced by its name, but they’re very clear that this isn’t a, as they describe it, “Marvel” version of this rich mythos. “The mythological thing has always been about symbolic value, never a cartoonish interpretation of Thor and Odin. There’s plenty of bands doing that, but we draw on other things,” expresses Sandøy. One of those on Utgard was Jungian psychology, particularly the notion of archetypes, and those themes do run somewhat onto Heimdal. The mythical figure is perhaps the most mysterious of all the Norse gods, with different interpretations painting the gatekeeper of Asgard in different ways. Crucially though, they aren’t interested in simply reliving the past.
“We all come from rural areas of Norway; I come from a tiny island off the coast and life for people there wasn’t that different from what it must have been 1000-1500 years ago. So you get a more concrete manifestation in how you deal with nature, or what these deities represented for them.” In short, they want to explore the mythos and the psychology of those that lived in the era these beliefs were commonplace, but rather than LARPing as people of that time, they, much like their musical legacy and approach, want to take those disparate elements and update them for the modern day.
“We’ve grown up in a society that exploits nature, and we’re conditioned to accept that. Our friend Einar [Selvik, WARDRUNA] he looks at the old ways and what is relevant now,” he begins. “It’s getting more and more pressing now with climate change and people being more conscious about not ruling over the natural world.” Those interpretations colour Heimdal to make it the fascinating, mysterious journey that it is, and perhaps is another reason why ENSLAVED remain the revered band that they are, growing and learning from the past to become the blackened prog masters of today.
Heimdal is out now via Nuclear Blast Records.
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