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Enslaved’s drummer, vocalist and producer on the primal power of a great riff, making Mið under pressure, and why you don’t need a studio full of expensive toys to make something worth hearing.
There are people who spend their entire lives chasing the perfect sound. The perfect microphone. The perfect plugin. The perfect fucking excuse for why the song still isn’t finished.
Then there’s Iver Sandøy.
Drummer, vocalist, producer, engineer and one of the musical brains behind Norwegian progressive metal institution Enslaved, Sandøy has spent decades on both sides of the studio glass. But talking to him, one thing becomes obvious: knowing your way around the machinery doesn’t mean you have to worship it.
Sometimes you just need to get the fucking song down.
The AC/DC school of songwriting
For all the progressive architecture and musical exploration associated with Enslaved, Sandøy hasn’t forgotten the primal kick that first pulled him towards heavy music.
AC/DC was his gateway drug.
He remembers discovering the early band with friends, watching their legendary live performance footage and getting caught up in the sheer energy of Phil Rudd hammering away behind those deceptively simple arrangements.
“I think what I keep getting from that is remembering that kind of kick that you got from the simplicity,” Sandøy explained.
That’s the beautiful bastard of a trick great songwriting pulls. A riff doesn’t need seventeen moving parts and a bloody engineering degree to get under your skin. Sometimes a handful of notes, the right melody and a band playing like their lives depend on it can do more damage than an entire musical thesaurus.
Enslaved might operate in considerably more complex territory, but Sandøy understands the importance of keeping that primal energy alive.
Making Mið under pressure
Enslaved’s seventeenth studio album, Mið, emerged from a writing and recording process that demanded a different approach.
The band arrived at the beginning of the studio sessions with only around two tracks written. With recording time booked and the clock ticking, there wasn’t much room for endless second-guessing.
For Sandøy, that pressure became part of the process.
“When the pressure is on, you just have to, well, experience kicks in and the pressure just kicks your brain into a bit of an overdrive,” he said.
The result, in his view, was an album that benefited from the more immediate, concentrated approach. Less time to exhaust every possible arrangement. More room for instinct to get a word in before the inner critic started waving its clipboard around.
It’s an interesting lesson for any musician: sometimes the deadline isn’t the enemy of creativity. Sometimes it’s the thing that finally gets creativity out of its own way.
Studio secrets and the gear obsession
Of course, I had to ask about the studio sauce.
Sandøy’s approach is refreshingly pragmatic. He’s a Pro Tools user, but he’s happy to work with stock plugins rather than depend on an endless collection of expensive software. His preferred vocal setup can involve a Neve-style preamp, an 1176 compressor and a tube limiter, while his microphone choices depend on the source and the job at hand.
But the bigger lesson wasn’t about buying the right gear. It was about making decisions quickly enough to preserve the performance.
Sandøy described using a microphone partly because it was already set up and ready to go. By the time you’ve dismantled the room to chase some theoretically perfect setup, the moment you’re trying to capture might already be gone.
“If I was given four SM57s, I would make an album, no problem.”
Read that again, especially if your home-studio shopping list has become longer than your list of finished songs.
The equipment matters. Knowing how to use it matters more. But neither replaces the song, the performance or the decision to actually hit record.
Knowing when to leave it alone
That’s what stuck with me most about this conversation. Sandøy has the experience and technical knowledge to get deep into the mechanics of recording, yet his advice repeatedly comes back to pragmatism, instinct and not fussing over every detail.
A great recording isn’t necessarily the one where every imperfection has been hunted down and executed. Sometimes it’s the one where the performance still has a pulse.
For musicians learning to record at home, that’s worth remembering. You can spend hours fixing something simply because the software allows you to. That doesn’t automatically mean the fix makes the music better.
Sometimes the best production decision is knowing when to stop.
And sometimes, if the riff is good enough, the rest is just machinery.
Enslaved’s Mið is scheduled for release on October 30, 2026, through Nuclear Blast Records.
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