This band has been in my idea pile for months with one line attached: Enslaved refuses to make the same album twice. Then the advance promo for the new record landed in the site inbox and gave me the push the idea pile never does. Fine. Three weeks before release is exactly when this piece should exist.
Enslaved is a Norwegian extreme metal band formed in Haugesund in 1991 and long based in Bergen, founded by Grutle Kjellson and a thirteen-year-old Ivar Bjørnson. They came up inside the early Norwegian black metal movement, rejected its rulebook almost immediately, and have spent three decades folding progressive rock, psychedelia and Norse history into a sound that belongs to nobody else. Their seventeenth album Mið arrives on 30 October 2026 through Nuclear Blast. Eight tracks. And this time the stated plan is restraint: strip back the sprawl, keep the instinct.
The three singles already out make the case better than the press text. Solar Will fuses black metal rasp to a mid-tempo heavy metal spine, with lyrics Kjellson says are built on a rivalry between two Norse figures he refuses to name. Spirit Helper brings in Kevin Kicking Woman, Tales of Trees moves like something half asleep and all the better for it, and the album version of I Am Ice features Sámi artist Johan Sara Jr. A record about ancient gathering places, sung across cultures. For a band that started in teenage Norwegian black metal orthodoxy, that is quite a distance travelled, and none of it accidental.
Here is the thing I keep coming back to. Most bands from the 1991 class either ended, calcified or became their own tribute act. Enslaved treated the turn away from pure black metal around Monumension and Below the Lights as the beginning, not the betrayal. Isa in 2004 was the turning point Bjørnson himself names. Since then every record has been a different room in the same house. Mið promising focus instead of sprawl is not a step back. It is a band 35 years in, still editing itself.
They headline Inferno territory by right these days, and in February 2027 they take this album across Europe co-headlining with Sólstafir, with Gaahls Wyrd opening. That bill alone tells you where Norwegian extreme metal lives now: not in a genre, in a lineage.
Put on Tales of Trees above. If it gets under your skin, the album lands 30 October. Mark it.
Listen to this: Mið
