Enslaved – Mið Review

It’s 17 albums for Enslaved now, comprising a discography I find exceptionally challenging to wrap my arms around. What’s going on here?

Does anyone else forget that the relatively rote and by-the-numbers Frost is actually their sophomore album, while the ambitiously psychedelic Vikingligr Veldi is the debut? What in the Bergtatt-preceding-Nattens Madrigal do I make of that nonsense?

Does their “prog” run start at the mighty Below the Lights and extend through Ruun … Or does it go from Mardraum (Beyond the Within) up until RIITIIR? Or …wait … have they always been a prog band?

Are Axioma Ethica Odini and Vertebrae prog-infused black metal, or black metal infused prog? Are they the best albums the band’s ever made?

What the hell is Blodhemn?

What, I wonder, is my favorite Enslaved album?

Much to ponder. And much to undermine a clear narrative that explains how we’ve gotten to where we are today.

I’d like to tell you that I firmly believe Enslaved started to spin their wheels on RIITIIR, hit a bit of nadir on the glossy and commercialized In Times, and that the run of E., Utgard and Heimdal represents a respectable but rather safe retreat to more predictable waters. But, you know what? That story gets frustrated every time I revisit any of these albums. RIITIIR is home to some of my favorite Enslaved riffs ever composed. In Times can ride with me in the SUV on any brisk Saturday morning drive. And any listen of the E → Heimdal run becomes an exercise in trying to find a point of dismissal that never quite comes.

So, I cannot quite tell you at what point in their career Enslaved found themselves on Mið. Are they on the upswing or in a creative rut? I’d offer you a different answer every time I enter the hall of mirrors they’ve constructed out of these seventeen albums.

But, here’s something simple: Mið is an exceptionally endearing album that sounds like nothing else in the band’s catalog. Here we have 42 minutes of primal cuts comprising some of the simplest songs but also some of the most fundamentally classic riffs ever put to tape by Ivar Bjørnson and co. 

In press materials leading up to Mið’s release the band dropped two breadcrumbs that were either extremely promising or foreboded terrible suffering, depending on your disposition.

1) The album would take great inspiration from Bathory’s Blood, Fire, Death, which was probably inevitable given that several members of Enslaved headlined 2026’s Hell’s Heroes festival as part of a tribute act bearing the name of that seminal album.

2) For the first time in their career, Enslaved did not enter the studio with a stack of prepared material and instead did much of the composing and arranging on the fly.

And you hear all that, almost right away, once the first proper black metal riff of Mið hits at around 35-seconds of “I am Ice.” Unruly tremolo on the lower strings and chromatic slides; fuck off to precision and metric ambition–we’re playing Quorthon riffs. This one rips right into my squishy middle like a God-botherer getting his first (and last) look at a longship. Same goes for the outwardly BFD-worshiping, hammer-swangin’ breakdown that hits at 2:20; I’d like to say Enslaved are back to basics here, but they’ve never been here before, except for maybe when they were zit-faced pre-teens getting their hair blown back by “A Fine Day to Die” for the first time. 

And how about that main riff in “Solar Will?”

Have you ever heard Enslaved embrace something so basic? So catchy? So “surely somebody already wrote this because it’s absolutely perfect?” Don’t get me wrong, Enslaved have written dozens of my all-time favorite riffs – currently the one that hits at :55s of “The Voices” off 2001’s Monumension tops my list – but I’m used to the Bergen boys providing a more abstract form of satisfaction. Rare is the Enslaved riff that makes me want to hurt something; but there’s just so much clobbering time here. But how else can you respond to the absolutely unbothered open string battery of “Parting’s” main riff? I’ve taken many journeys to the center of my mind with Enslaved as my soundtrack, but on Mið we ride into glory. 

So, how far can they push their simplified approach? Well, far enough for me that Mið will absolutely be among my favorite albums of 2026 while jockeying its way up, down and around my personal ever-shifting ranking of their discography – but perhaps not quite so far I wouldn’t recommending trimming seven-minute album closer “I Miðju,” which adds length but not depth to Mið. And the hurlyburly and potentially Gojira-inspired breakdown in “Mountain?” Not quite my (or the band’s) tempo, really.

But, what Enslaved does so, so right here is set aside the embellishments of their prior work and present what we now call black metal as an utterly universal, pre-civilization experience. My absolute album highlight, “Spirit Helper,” which features Blackfeet Nation elder Kevin Kicking Woman on vocals, thrives not in presenting a gimmicky contrast between indigenous music and black metal but in reveling in the gobsmacking synergy. The riffs rule, the vocals are majestic – this is the sound of brothers absolutely locking in together. 

The cover of Mið features a rock formation inspired by Medicine Wheel, an indigenous sacred stone structure found in Lovel, Wyoming, and the Hunnfelt, a Bronze Age artifact residing in South-East Norway. As the crow flies, the distance between these two ancient monuments is about 4,500. 

Here’s the compelling argument put forward by Enslaved on Mið; that distance means nothing. What matters is that both reside under the very same sky as you and I, and where we were once, and could be once again, wild creatures.

So, please step back into Enslaved’s hall of mirrors. But this time, bring a hammer.