I don't think it's far-fetched to say that Utgard is playing it safe to some degree, but even an Enslaved sticking to its last decades' worth of sounds has a massive sandbox of riffs and combinations to play around, and tracks like the rollicking prog metal bite of "Sequence", with the ambiance of the other instruments layered over the verses or the synthy Hawkwind-esque space rock of "Urjotun" are welcome and refreshing additions to the Norwegians' canon.
Utgard is very smoothly mixed and mastered, and surprisingly, while it doesn't lack for the complexity or inaccessibility of its compositional structure, it's somewhat more accessible on its surface level than other recent efforts like In Times or E. To be clear, there are things here that you might not have exactly heard before, like some of the approach to proggy jamming, a few of the vocal configurations with these three throats, or some of the more exotic lead guitar passages, but you're still hearing a lot of the familiar aesthetics that defined their last 7-8 albums, like the spacious Pink Floyd sections, or the wintry black metal surges dominant on discs like Isa and Ruun. That's not to say that Utgard is some crowning milestone of their career, because at its heart it's not one of their more interesting in terms of its quantities of nuance or creativity. This is truly one of the best of the business, an outfit which can seamlessly integrate disparate ideas, never truly compromise, and continue to garner the respect of both their audience and metal media. But it wasn't until I watched them perform the new album in its entirety on one of their COVID-19 quarantine live-streams, that the hooks really started to sink into me that I started to feel that hypnotic draw which their signature blend of progressive elements and Viking black metal has long manifest since the turn of the century when their style truly began to expand. When I heard the first few singles for this latest Enslaved album, "Homebound" and "Jettegryta", I was suitably impressed, and thought immediately that drummer Iver Sandøy was a cool addition to the roster, bringing them yet another avenue for the soaring clean vocals they like to measure off against Grutle's snarling, or the other cleans contributed by both Vinje and Kjellson.
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