Album review: Enslaved – Heimdal

In Norse mythology, the figure of Heimdal is an enigmatic one. The guardian between the nine realms, after Ragnarök, he’s said to be the one set to replace Odin, representing a new dawn. There’s also debate on who he actually is, with some suggesting that he’s really Odin himself.  Such a character is ripe for a look at through the Enslaved microscope. Indeed, singer/guitarist Ivar Bjørnson describes the band’s look at him on their 16th album as ​“going down a rabbit hole”, something that doesn’t so easily fit into a normal conceptual framework. This itself is instructive of Enslaved themselves. Thirty-one years since Heimdal first made his appearance on the then-youthful Bergen black metal outfit’s Yggdrasill demo, they remain a similarly hard to gu...

unsplash-logoLilith Redmoon