Enslaved released their seventeenth album Mið through Nuclear Blast, and on the same day put out a visualiser for the focus track I Am Ice, which features the Sami musician Johan Sara Jr.
What that collaboration actually sounds like is the point. A joik is not a guest vocal in the usual sense. It is an older form with its own logic, and Ivar Bjørnson describes it as opening a space where different ages and distant places seem to exist at once, with guitars and percussion moving through that space and taking on the friction of the meeting.
Bjørnson calls the album an exploration of the idea of a centre, and says the question it raises is what we are moving towards. He frames the work as following an idea far enough that it starts to challenge the reasons for following it.
Grutle Kjellson wrote the words for this one in a way he says he rarely does, finishing the lyrics in full before fitting them to any music. He was studying the metrics and verse structure of Old Norse skaldic poetry at the time, and the lines came out shaped by it.
Bjørnson adds that I Am Ice carries the seeds of the whole record inside it, and that returning to the song after the album has played through changes what it means.