Thirty-five years and seventeen albums into a career built on refusing to stand still, Enslaved are still finding new ways to challenge not only what the band can sound like, but how they actually get there.
Their forthcoming album, Mið, arrives October 30 through Nuclear Blast Records. Its Old Norse title points towards the centre or the middle, an idea that feels particularly fitting for a band that has spent decades moving between extremes. Black metal and progressive rock, brutality and atmosphere, ancient traditions and modern expression have all existed inside the Enslaved universe, often without any need to choose one over the other.
Catching up with drummer, vocalist, producer and engineer Iver Sandøy, what quickly became clear was that Mið is not about Enslaved suddenly finding some safe middle ground.
It is about finding balance while the chaos continues around you.
It is also an album where that philosophy worked its way directly into the creative process. Enslaved loosened their usual methods, wrote and recorded under enormous pressure, followed a Blackfeet prayer instead of forcing it into a pre-existing structure, allowed folk rhythms to move like a dance rather than a mathematical exercise, and brought Sámi yoik into the album through somebody who genuinely carries that tradition.
For Sandøy, much of it comes back to one deceptively simple idea.
Before he is a drummer, producer or vocalist, he is a listener.
Finding the Centre After Utgard
When Enslaved released Utgard in 2020, much of the album dealt with crossing boundaries and moving outside the ordered world into something more chaotic and unknown. Six years later, Mið turns the perspective back towards the centre.
For Sandøy, that shift feels like a natural result of everything that happened in between.
The years following Utgard brought upheaval on a scale few could have predicted, while the members of Enslaved were moving through another six years of their own lives. Eventually, he explained, you have to find a way of rebalancing yourself if you are going to continue dealing with everything happening around you.
That does not mean shutting the outside world away. If anything, Mið still reaches far beyond Enslaved themselves. Sandøy pointed towards the cross-cultural relationships woven into the album as examples of the band continuing to explore outward while paying more attention to the internal balance required to process it all.
That relationship between inward reflection and outward exploration would also become part of how the record was made.
Enslaved Enter the Pressure Cooker
After decades together, any band inevitably develops methods that work.
You learn which processes produce results, which ones create problems and where everyone fits inside the machine. Enslaved were no different, but Mið disrupted some of those familiar patterns simply because there was no other choice.
Normally the band would have extensive demos circulating for months before the proper recording process began.
This time, much of the album was not fully written when they entered the studio.
“The album was written, recorded and mixed in record time for Enslaved,” Sandøy explained.
Instead of arriving with everything mapped out, the band had to solve problems while they were happening. Writing, recording and arrangement began overlapping, forcing everybody to trust instinct far more than usual.
Sandøy remembers it as refreshing, even if the pace eventually left him exhausted. Once the process really started, everyone found themselves inside what he described as a pressure cooker. Grutle Kjellson was writing and sending in lyrics while other elements were already being recorded, Ivar Bjørnson continued developing the instrumental compositions, and the rest of the band built vocal melodies, solos and keyboard arrangements around what was rapidly taking shape.
Sandøy was right in the middle of all of it.
Alongside playing drums and contributing vocals, he was producing, engineering and tracking the other members. By the time they finally signed off on the mix roughly a month and a half later, the intensity had taken its toll, but there was also the satisfaction of knowing everybody had risen to the occasion.
That lack of a comfortable safety net may be one of the reasons Mið feels so alive.
Instead of thinking an idea to death before committing it to tape, Enslaved often had to trust the thing happening directly in front of them.
“Spirit Helper”: Letting the Prayer Lead
Few tracks demonstrate that willingness to surrender the usual process better than “Spirit Helper”.
Featuring Kevin Kicking Woman, an Elder of the Blackfeet Nation, the song began in almost the opposite way to a conventional Enslaved composition.
There was no finished Enslaved track waiting for a guest vocal.
There was Kevin’s prayer.
Bjørnson had originally recorded the performance on his phone during an earlier meeting, keeping it for some time before eventually returning to the recording and asking what the band could actually do with it.
Almost immediately, something remarkable appeared.
Kevin’s natural pitch lined up with Enslaved’s tuning.
For Sandøy, it felt like something that was simply meant to happen.
The more important decision, though, was what Enslaved did not do next.
Traditional or Indigenous vocals have often been used in rock and metal by taking a performance and placing it over music that already exists. Inevitably, that usually means editing, stretching or reshaping the original contribution until it obeys the band’s structure.
Enslaved reversed that relationship.
The band followed Kevin.
His timing, phrasing, breathing and natural metre became the foundation on which “Spirit Helper” was built.
For Sandøy, that created an unusual challenge behind the kit. Recording drums still requires some kind of rhythmic framework, but Kevin was singing naturally without a metronome. His tempo moved. Phrases stretched. The metre changed according to the prayer rather than a predetermined grid.
The resulting arrangement moves through different metres, including 3/4, 5/4, 6/4 and even a sudden bar of 9/8.
None of it exists because Enslaved wanted to write something that looked clever on paper.
It exists because that is where Kevin’s voice went.
The band mapped their way around his performance and followed those changes on his terms, preserving the subtle movement in tempo rather than ironing it into mechanical perfection.
That is where the track gets its distinctly human pulse.
By the time Sandøy was performing the drums, he was not simply counting bars anymore. He was falling into Kevin’s breathing and phrasing.
For a progressive band, it is an interesting reversal of expectations. The complexity comes from respecting something natural rather than deliberately trying to make something complicated.
“Solar Will” and Enslaved’s Bonham Guy
From the shifting human pulse of “Spirit Helper”, Mið moves into a completely different kind of rhythmic weight with “Solar Will”.
The drums feel enormous, but not because Sandøy is trying to fill every available second with activity. Much of the weight comes from space, placement and the physical impact of the groove itself.
There is a good reason it fits him so naturally.
Sandøy and Bjørnson have known each other for more than 25 years, long before Sandøy formally joined Enslaved. Over all those years, Bjørnson has known exactly where one of his old mate’s biggest rhythmic loves sits.
Sandøy laughed as he described himself as “the Bonham guy.”
So when some of the riffs for Mið began arriving, there were moments where the intention was immediately obvious.
Sandøy recalled Bjørnson playing him the day’s new material over morning coffee and instantly recognising what was being handed to him.
“I see what you’re doing here. I get totally what you want.”
That heavier, John Bonham-inspired approach to groove is something Sandøy has explored more directly in other projects, and something he and Bjørnson have circled around inside Enslaved for years. On Mið, Sandøy feels it has finally been allowed to become far more prominent.
The beauty is in what happens when those sections collide with the band’s heavier metallic language.
The huge grooves give the more recognisably extreme sections somewhere to come from, and that contrast makes both approaches hit harder.
It is another example of Mið finding heaviness without simply piling more sound into the mix.
“Tales Of Trees”: It Should Feel Like a Dance
“Tales Of Trees” takes the rhythmic conversation somewhere else again.
The song moves through winding time signatures rooted in folk music, but Sandøy’s approach to those rhythms is almost the complete opposite of treating odd metre like a technical challenge.
For him, the key is movement.
“It is about a dance.”
Folk music can contain rhythms that appear unusual when written down, but those rhythms were not created so musicians could congratulate themselves for successfully counting them.
People moved to them.
Sandøy approaches “Tales Of Trees” by locating the natural accents already living inside the riff and melody, then using the drums to make that movement feel instinctive.
Once you internalise it properly, he explained, you stop thinking of the passage as odd time at all.
It is simply where the accent falls.
That became especially important because the track also contains an almost constant barrage of double kick. Modern metal production can easily turn bass drums into an unnaturally even machine, and Sandøy recognised that doing so here could destroy the dance underneath the riff.
Instead, he allowed dynamics to remain inside the kicks themselves.
That might sound like a small production detail, but it speaks to something Enslaved are particularly happy about across Mið. The album remains unmistakably metal without sacrificing movement and dynamics in pursuit of absolute mechanical precision.
Sandøy even revealed during our conversation that there is essentially only one blast beat across the entire record.
There were other places where he floated the possibility of breaking into something more traditionally old-school, but the feeling within the room was essentially that they had already scratched that particular itch.
There was no need to repeat it simply because blasting is part of the band’s history.
If the song does not need it, it does not belong there.
A Drummer Who Thinks Like a Listener
Putting “Spirit Helper”, “Solar Will” and “Tales Of Trees” beside each other, I kept coming back to how differently the drums behave from track to track.
They are not simply holding the compositions together.
They are responding to what each song is trying to communicate.
Sandøy’s explanation for that approach ended up becoming one of the most revealing moments of our entire conversation.
He does not really think of himself as a drummer first.
He thinks of himself as a listener.
There was plenty of Sandøy humour attached to the story. He joked that he originally ended up playing drums because he was the worst guitarist, essentially falling to the bottom of the guitar-playing pecking order.
What followed was a much bigger insight into how he makes music.
“I have no big ego connected to the fact that I’m a drummer,” he told me.
Sandøy can become extremely particular about what he believes a song needs, but he does not particularly care whether he is the person who performs that part.
He wants to hear the idea.
Who plays or sings it is secondary to whether the song gets what it needs.
That mindset goes a long way towards explaining how somebody can operate as both musician and producer without constantly fighting himself for attention.
It also shapes how Sandøy drums around Enslaved’s vocals.
Whenever possible, he prefers to perform with the finished vocal either already recorded or firmly established in his head. His drum parts can then comment on the vocal and move around it instead of operating independently underneath it.
“We’re humans,” Sandøy explained, “so when there are vocals there, that is the main focus for most listeners anyway.”
It is an incredibly simple philosophy for music that can become incredibly complicated.
Listen first.
Play second.
“I Am Ice”, Johan Sara Jr. and the Yoik Tradition
That listening-first mentality becomes particularly important again on “I Am Ice”, which features Johan Sara Jr. and the Sámi tradition of yoik.
Sandøy’s relationship with Sara predates Mið.
Around the COVID period, Sara approached Sandøy about recording at the studio he co-owns. What he proposed immediately caught Sandøy’s attention: yoik, drums, analogue synthesizers and sound effects woven together into something atmospheric and deeply rooted in Sámi musical tradition.
For somebody familiar with Sandøy’s work and Enslaved’s musical universe, it is not difficult to understand why he wanted in.
That earlier relationship eventually created a direct bridge into Mið.
Sandøy was careful when explaining yoik because describing it simply as a song does not really capture what the tradition represents.
A person can have a yoik.
A place can have a yoik.
An action can have a yoik.
Rather than simply singing about something, the relationship runs deeper between the vocal expression and the person, place or experience it carries.
When Enslaved began discussing bringing that tradition into “I Am Ice”, Grutle Kjellson had already spent some time studying yoik himself.
They could have attempted an approximation.
Instead, the feeling was that if they were going to do it, they should ask somebody who genuinely carried the tradition.
Sandøy knew exactly who to call.
“I know someone.”
Johan Sara Jr. came in and created his own interpretation of the track, but importantly, he did not simply arrive and add a recognisable Sámi vocal sound to make the song more exotic.
Sandøy was particularly conscious of that danger.
He pointed to examples where yoik has been used superficially, sometimes to the point of becoming almost parodic. Sara approached “I Am Ice” from the opposite direction.
He dug into the lyrics.
He dug into the concept.
The yoik emerged from what the song itself was actually saying.
That makes “I Am Ice” an interesting counterpart to “Spirit Helper”.
With Kevin Kicking Woman, Enslaved received the traditional performance first and reshaped themselves around it.
With Johan Sara Jr., the Enslaved track already existed, and the traditional contribution entered later.
Two completely different creative processes.
The common thread is the effort to allow the person carrying the tradition to bring something genuine into the music rather than simply borrowing the surface sound of that tradition.
The Centre Is Still Moving
That might ultimately be the most interesting thing about Mið.
The album may be named after the centre, but Enslaved have not suddenly stopped moving.
If anything, the centre becomes the point from which all of these different relationships can be explored.
There is the balance between planning and instinct when a band with an established recording process suddenly finds itself writing inside the studio.
There is the balance between human rhythm and technical structure when “Spirit Helper” follows Kevin Kicking Woman’s breathing through shifting metres.
There is the physical weight of “Solar Will”, where Sandøy is finally given room to bring more of that Bonham-inspired groove into Enslaved.
There is “Tales Of Trees”, where odd metre stops being mathematics and becomes a dance.
There is “I Am Ice”, where Enslaved bring Sámi yoik into their world through somebody who actually carries that tradition rather than trying to imitate it themselves.
And sitting inside all of that is Iver Sandøy, a drummer who would rather think like a listener, a producer who does not care who performs an idea as long as the song gets what it needs, and a musician who seems perfectly comfortable allowing Enslaved’s progressive side to come from feel rather than showing off how complicated something can be.
Thirty-five years into Enslaved’s journey, Mið does not sound like a band finally arriving at some fixed destination.
Maybe that was never the point.
Sometimes finding the centre is simply finding somewhere strong enough to stand while you keep exploring everything around it.
Enslaved release Mið on October 30 through Nuclear Blast Records.
Pre-orderMið here: https://enslaved.bfan.link/mid
Watch the full Crannk interview with Iver Sandøy for our complete conversation on the creation of Mið, the human rhythm behind “Spirit Helper”, bringing Bonham-sized groove into “Solar Will”, the folk pulse of “Tales Of Trees”, Johan Sara Jr. and Sámi yoik on “I Am Ice”, and why Sandøy still considers himself a listener before a drummer.
