Enslaved: Black Metal That Kept Growing Up

Most bands that start in their early teens make a couple of rough records and disappear. Enslaved started with a thirteen-year-old and a seventeen-year-old in a Norwegian coastal town in 1991, playing some of the most uncompromising music on earth, and thirty-odd years later they are still going, still led by the same two people, and playing music so much larger and stranger than where they began that the word “black metal” barely contains it any more. The Enslaved story is the best answer I know to a question extreme metal usually refuses to ask: what happens if a band in the most dogmatic corner of heavy music simply keeps growing, decade after decade, and never stops.

Two kids in Haugesund

Enslaved were formed in 1991 in Haugesund, a town on the west coast of Norway, by Ivar Bjørnson and Grutle Kjellson, who were thirteen and seventeen at the time. Sit with those ages for a second. They had been playing together in a death-metal band called Phobia, and, like a lot of restless young musicians in the region at the start of the 1990s, they were casting around for something colder, harsher and more their own. They found black metal, took the name Enslaved from a track on an Immortal demo, and set off.

The timing put them right in the middle of one of the most notorious moments in music history. The early Norwegian black-metal scene of the early 1990s produced extraordinary records and also a genuinely dark chapter of real-world violence: a string of church burnings, and the 1993 killing of Mayhem’s Euronymous by Burzum’s Varg Vikernes. These are documented crimes, not folklore, and there is nothing romantic about them; the arsons destroyed irreplaceable historic buildings and a man was murdered. What is worth saying about Enslaved is that they were among the youngest bands orbiting that scene and that their path led somewhere entirely different — into mythology, ideas and musical exploration rather than criminality. They came up alongside the notoriety without becoming part of its worst history, and their long career is the argument that the scene’s music always mattered more than its scandals.

Their earliest releases are foundational second-wave black metal. The 1994 debut Vikingligr Veldi and the same year’s Frost are cold, fierce, atmospheric records, and they announced the theme that would run through everything the band did: the Viking and Norse heritage of Norway. Where much of the scene fixated on Satanic imagery, Enslaved reached instead for Old Norse mythology, Icelandic sagas, runes and the pre-Christian religious world of the North. That choice gave the band a deeper well to draw from than shock ever could, and it is a big part of why they lasted. You can only be transgressive for so long. You can explore a mythology forever.

The turn toward the exploratory

Here is where Enslaved become genuinely unusual. Almost as soon as they had mastered black metal, they got bored of its rules. By the mid-1990s they were already bending song structures in ways the genre’s purists frowned on, and across the late 1990s and early 2000s they steadily let other things in: progressive rock, psychedelia, clean singing, extended instrumental passages, the influence of adventurous 1970s bands like Pink Floyd and King Crimson and Rush sitting right alongside the tremolo and the blast beats. They stopped calling themselves a black-metal band and started preferring the looser tag “extreme metal”, because the original label had become a cage they had outgrown.

Records like Below the Lights in 2003, Isa in 2004 and Ruun in 2006 are the sound of a band remaking itself in slow motion, each album a little more expansive and confident than the last. The harsh vocals stayed, Kjellson’s guttural roar anchoring everything, but they were now answered by soaring clean vocals and washes of keyboard, and the songs grew long, patient and architectural. By the time of Axioma Ethica Odini in 2010 and RIITIIR in 2012, Enslaved were a progressive metal band with black-metal roots as much as anything else, capable of ferocity and beauty in the same eight-minute piece. They kept collecting Spellemannprisen awards, Norway’s equivalent of a Grammy, an establishment embrace that would have been unthinkable for the scene they emerged from.

The clean-vocal dimension is worth dwelling on, because it is where the band’s whole philosophy lives. For a long stretch the soaring melodic voice belonged to the keyboardist Herbrand Larsen, and in the current lineup it comes from Håkon Vinje, and its presence changes the fundamental grammar of the music. A pure black-metal song is a single mood held at extremity. An Enslaved song is a conversation between two voices, the harsh and the clean, the hostile and the yearning, and it is that dialogue that lets the band build the long, cresting structures that define their mature work. The clean vocal is not decoration. It is the second character in a drama, and it gives the roar something to answer, which is why the heavy parts land harder than they would in a band that only ever screamed. Later records like In Times in 2015, E in 2017 and Utgard in 2020 kept refining that balance, each one the work of a band still genuinely curious about what it might become next.

What makes this evolution admirable rather than just restless is that they never threw the old thing away to chase the new one. Enslaved did not abandon their heaviness in a scramble for respectability. They grew outward from it, adding without subtracting, so that a modern Enslaved song can contain a passage as cold and hostile as anything from 1994 and, minutes later, a soaring melodic section that could break your heart. That is a very hard balance to hold across thirty years, and most bands that try either calcify into self-parody or dilute themselves into nothing.

The engine room: two men and a rotating cast

The constant through all of it is Bjørnson and Kjellson. The lineup around them has changed many times — the current band includes the guitarist Arve Isdal, the keyboardist and clean singer Håkon Vinje, and the drummer Iver Sandøy — but the two founders have been the sole continuous members since a couple of teenagers picked the name off a demo tape. That partnership is the whole secret. A band held together by two people who genuinely share a vision, and who have grown up together inside it, can survive lineup churn, shifting fashions and the passage of decades in a way that a democracy of five egos never could.

You can hear the benefit of that stability at the festivals. Enslaved have become one of the most reliably excellent live bands in European heavy music, a fixture of the big loud gatherings, the sort of act that gets a late-afternoon or main-stage slot and justifies it completely. When they play a festival like Copenhell, you are watching a band with thirty years of material to draw from and the range to make an extreme-metal crowd headbang and go quiet and lift their arms all in the same set. The songs are built for that dynamic — they breathe, they build, they earn their heavy parts by making you wait for them.

Why growing up is the radical move

The reason Enslaved matter, and the reason I keep coming back to them, is that they proved a thing extreme metal desperately needed proven: that you can take the most dogmatic, rule-bound genre in heavy music and let it mature without betraying it. Black metal has always had a strong purist streak, a suspicion of anything that smells of progress or ambition, an instinct that says the true form was fixed in about 1993 and everything since is dilution. Enslaved treated that orthodoxy the way they treated the black-metal label itself — as a starting point to grow out of, not a commandment to obey.

That instinct connects them to the best of the wider Norwegian scene. I’ve written about Satyricon taking their black metal into an actual opera house with the Norwegian National Opera Chorus, another band from the same world deciding that ambition and extremity could share a stage. And you can hear a very different exit from the same tradition in the genre-blind, rock-and-roll-loving noise of Kvelertak, a younger Norwegian band that also treated black metal as raw material rather than a religion. Norway’s greatest gift to heavy music was never just the coldness of the early records. It was the small number of bands who realised the coldness was a foundation you could build almost anything on top of.

Enslaved built the most on it. From two kids in Haugesund making frostbitten teenage black metal to a band that headlines progressive-metal festivals and gets written up in serious music journals, the arc is one of the most complete in the whole scene. They kept the roots, kept the founders, kept the mythology, and let everything else keep expanding. Most bands are lucky to have one good idea. Enslaved had one good idea in 1991 and have spent thirty years discovering how large it could get. Black metal that kept growing up turned out to be the version that grew into something permanent.