Enslaved guitarist Ivar Bjørnson had a bunch of material ready to go for the band’s 17th album, so much that the Norwegian prog-metal shapeshifters booked studio time to record it. Then he decided to scrap most of his demos and start over. “It was nerve-wracking,” he tells Apple Music. “But I have to say it turned out to be unnecessarily scary, in a sense. I wrote the song ‘I Am Ice’ over a long period of time, and I knew the rest of the album had to have that kind of directness and spontaneity. Then we decided on the concept, which is based on this Mið thing, which is a perfect pun for people who don’t like the album: Enslaved at its mid-est.” But in true Enslaved fashion, there’s nothing “mid” about Mið. As the first proper song on the album, “I Am Ice” features yoik singer Johan Sara Jr chanting in the ancient Sami tradition over a percussive cannonade laid down by Enslaved drummer/singer/producer and all-around ace-in-the-hole Iver Sandøy as bassist Grutle Kjellson and keyboardist Håkon Vinje provide vocal counterpoint. From there, the band unfurls a majestic black metal space odyssey that doubles as an ambitious concept album. “The album is about perspective,” Bjørnson says. “It’s about the subjective experience of reality, if you want to be pompous about it. And I guess that’s what music is about: having grandiose ideas and believing in them and listening for ‘What is the world around me? How does it affect me? How did it create my experience of the world?’ That might sound like a solitary thing or an ego trip, but it’s quite the contrary, I think. It really boils down to believing in your own point of view, your own subjectivity. If you truly do that, you will also recognize every other perspective, that there are as many worlds on this planet as there are people at every time. You can interact with it, you can connect, and you can be inspired.” The band chose “Solar Will” as the first public representation of Mið. A simultaneously ferocious and hypnotic crusher, it has a killer solo from guitarist Arve “Ice Dale” Isdal. “We’re working with so many archetypes and have so many songs with different tempos and moods that nothing is going to really represent the whole album,” Bjørnson concedes. On “Spirit Helper,” Enslaved is joined by Kevin Kicking Woman of the Blackfeet Nation, whom the band met in 2022 when they first performed at the Fire in the Mountains Festival on the Blackfeet reservation in Montana. “Similar to what Johan does on ‘I Am Ice,’ the kind of singing Kevin does is nonverbal, but it does carry meaning,” Bjørnson points out. “One of the things that’s been blowing my mind for the last few years as we learn more about indigenous languages is that we all at one point spoke like that, where the words convey their meaning in the sound. For example, the word for ‘thunder’ might be a very metal-sounding word, but the word for ‘flower’ would be softer. We’ve moved very far away from that in our modern languages.” Bjørnson views the kind of storytelling and collaboration that Enslaved is doing on Mið as a new era for the band. “It’s kind of ridiculous to be on album number 17 and go, ‘Okay, what do we do to introduce some spice into this?’” he says. “But I think we found a way. And it doesn’t really matter how far into your career you are. There’s always the option of choosing not to be safe, but to go with your instinct and stick to the mission statement we’ve had since ’91: We want to make our own favorite music with our favorite people. And that’s what we’re doing.”