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Ivar Bjørnson says Enslaved pushed themselves into a new way of writing songs when he decided the material he’d witten for new album Mið wasn’t good enough to use.
The follow-up to 2023’s Heimdal came about when he suggested they should start studio work without any material ready to track. He took inspiration from an ancient Norse saga – which in the end framed Mið (pronounced “Myth” and meaning “Middle”), described by Prog as “a wonderful, psyche- cleansing antidote to the drudgery and gloom of everyday life.”
Bjørnson tells Blabbermouth: “I felt like a lunatic when I presented it to the guys – ‘We’re going to book the studio.’ ‘Do you have the songs ready?’ ‘Not exactly… We’re going to record it as we come up with it.’” But it worked out: “They said, ‘Yeah, sure; sounds great!’”
He said the experiences was “a bit of an evolution” as the music came together, until the time came to focus on lyrics. That’s when he recalled a saga with the translated title Missing Your Head.
“This bard was so eloquent that, at some point, he did something to piss off a king,” Bjørnson says. “As they put his head on the block and raised the axe to rid him of his head, he started reciting a poem – he improvised it. The king couldn’t get enough of it, and he ended up getting out of it since he made up this fantastic song.”
Reflecting that “the lyrical process can be good, doing it sort of at gunpoint,” he explains that the situation Enslaved had put themselves in became the concept behind Mið. “What’s the album about? We are storytelling creatures. That’s what science is telling us: our strand of humans succeeded because we’re good at telling stories.
“As a function of gathering and common goals, loyalty, we won because we like to be in groups and all that stuff. That also gave us the desperate need to understand or seek connections and explanations.”
As Prog notes, Mið features “everything from Indigenous American chants to the music of the Arctic region. And lots of crushing heaviness.”
Bjørnson reflects: “It was really something special for us – it brought out a lot of ‘heads on the chopping block’ good ideas; things that really felt good as a group, working together.” He adds: “It’s not like we have to do this on the next album; or, ‘Next time we’re going to write songs as we parachute out of a plane.’
“It’s not that. It’s more like, if you’re open to challenging yourself and sometimes being inspired, don’t think too much about stuff. Just be a band and it’s going to work out.”
Mið is on sale now.
