Enslaved — Spirit Helper (feat. Kevin Kicking Woman)
A Blackfeet morning prayer song inside a Norwegian extreme metal album. Kevin Kicking Woman is an elder of the Blackfeet Nation in Montana who teaches the Blackfeet language at his old high school. He shared a traditional prayer song with Enslaved and this track grew around it, a collaboration that started back in 2019 at the Fire In The Mountains festival on Blackfeet land. Mið is out since yesterday, and this is its beating heart.
Mið came out yesterday, and if you only have time for one track, make it this one. Spirit Helper is built around a traditional morning prayer song that Kevin Kicking Woman, an elder of the Blackfeet Nation in Montana, shared with the band. He is not a sample or a studio flourish: his singing carries whole sections of the track, with Enslaved building their weight around it instead of over it.
The collaboration has roots. It goes back to 2019 and grew out of Fire In The Mountains, the festival held on Blackfeet land where Enslaved played this summer. Kicking Woman teaches the Blackfeet language and culture at his old high school in Browning, which makes this the second voice on Mið doing exactly that kind of work: track two features Johan Sara Jr, a Sámi artist from Enslaved’s own side of the Atlantic. A Norwegian band singing about ancient gathering places, flanked by a Blackfeet elder and a Sámi musician. The album’s theme is not in the press text. It is in the credits.
We wrote the full deep dive on Mið three weeks before release, and the thing we said then holds now the album is out: this band treats restraint as a new experiment, not a retreat. Spirit Helper is what that sounds like when it opens the door to someone else’s tradition and lets it lead.
Listen to this: Mið