E is the fourteenth studio album by the Norwegian extreme metal bandEnslaved. It was released on October 13, 2017 by Nuclear Blast. This is the first album recorded without the longtime keyboardist / vocalist Herbrand Larsen since 2004, who left the band in late 2016 and was replaced by Håkon Vinje in 2017. This would also be the last album with Cato Bekkevold on drums before he quit in 2018. It was given Norway's 2017 Spellemann Award for best metal album of the year.
Artwork
The title of the album represents the initial letter of the band name but written with the runic character ehwaz on a minimalist and dark wooden cover art, created by designer and painter Truls Espedal. The concept of the symbol, is treated in a certain way in "Sacred Horse". Enslaved songwriter and guitarist Ivar Bjørnson said:
They used an alphabet, the runes, twenty-four different symbols that were used both for writing, normal stuff like'this guy owns this few cows' and stuff, and then it was also used for esoteric works, or magic, as it were, in popular history. I guess behind each of those runes there was a meaning, and this particular one means ‘horse’, in mythology the most famous horse is Sleipnir, Odin’s own horse, the one with the eight legs. So, of course, it has a deeper meaning, like person and horse, it symbolises the whole concept of relationships and positive dependency.
The album maintains a musical style quite similar to its predecessor In Times, although perhaps a little more melodic and atmospheric, following the base of progressive metal traditional. The lyrical themes revolve around Norse mythology, vikings, and especially, around nature and ancient Nordic spirituality. Bjørnson explains:
Everything we do and create are imitations of nature; as we evolved from nature, that is how it must be — yet modern man thinks he and she is independent of nature, that we somehow are so superior that we do not have to take nature into consideration other than as a backdrop for shitty movies. Or festivals. Losing touch with nature is basically to lose touch with being human.
Recording and production
E was composed and written from April 2016 to March 2017. Subsequently, Iver Sandøy was hired again as the record producer. It was recorded at Duper & Solslottet Studios, Conclave & Earshot, Peersonal Sound inBergen between April - May 2017 and was mixed and mastered by Jens Bogren at Fascination Street Studios in Örebro, Sweden in June 2017. As usual in all Enslaved albums, E was once again written by the duo composer of guitarist Ivar Bjørnson and singer and bassist Grutle Kjellson. Marks the introduction of their new keyboard master and clean vocalist Håkon Vinje of Seven Impale, a close collaborator of Bjørnson and Einar Selvik in their parallel musical project, called Skuggsjá. The special edition of the album includes two bonus tracks recorded simultaneously but with no relation to the style of the rest: a black-doom song composed in Norwegian titled "Djupet" and a cover of the 2005 Röyksopp hit "What Else Is There?", performed mostly by Vinje. A music videos were made for the singles "Storm Son" and "The River's Mouth", both directed by Josh Graham, who previously worked with Soundgarden and Neurosis among others.
