- Country: Norway
- Style: Progressive black metal
- Label: Nuclear Blast Records
- Release date: 30 October 2026
Thirty-five years after Ivar Bjørnson and Grutle Kjellson started the band in western Norway, Enslaved have reached their seventeenth studio album. Mið is an Old Norse word for the middle or centre, and the record is built around that idea: an axis, a point everything else turns around. It follows 2023’s Heimdal, and it is a tighter, more direct album than its predecessor – eight tracks, around 42 minutes, no song that wanders off into the cosmos for a quarter of an hour.
The five-piece – Grutle on vocals and bass, Bjørnson and Arve “Ice Dale” Isdal on guitars, Håkon Vinje on keyboards and Iver Sandøy on drums and clean vocals – kept production in-house again, with Bjørnson, Kjellson and Sandøy credited, and sent the tapes to Fascination Street Studios in Sweden for mixing and mastering.
What stands out most is how much of the band’s early black metal is back in the riffs. “Solar Will” is built on one plain, heavy tremolo riff and a swinging, rock-based drum pattern, and it works because nobody tries to dress it up. “Parting”, the longest song at just over eight minutes, opens up into an acoustic passage that would not sound out of place on a late-80s Bathory record, then returns to the grind. The progressive side has not gone anywhere – Vinje’s keys and Sandøy’s clean voice still lift the choruses – but it now serves the songs instead of leading them.
Two guests give the album its centre of gravity. Sámi yoik singer Johan Sara Jr. appears on “I Am Ice”, and “Spirit Helper” carries the voice of Kevin Kicking Woman of the Blackfeet Nation. It is an old Enslaved theme – Norse tradition in conversation with the rest of the world – handled here with more respect than spectacle.
Not everything lands. The short opener “Non-Being” is a doorway you hardly notice, and the seven-minute closer “I Miðju” makes its point well before it ends. But in the middle stretch, from “Solar Will” to “Tales of Trees”, this is the sound of a veteran band choosing to be simpler, and getting heavier for it.
Best tracks:
Solar Will
Spirit Helper
Parting
Author’s rating: 8/10
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