Enslaved release Mið tomorrow through Nuclear Blast. Eight tracks, and the shape of them tells you most of what the record is doing.
It opens with Non-Being, seventy nine seconds long, which is an overture rather than a song. Then I Am Ice and Solar Will at around five minutes each, Mountain at 5:46, Spirit Helper at 4:52, and then Parting stretches to 8:16. Tales of Trees pulls back to 4:43 before I Miðju closes it at 7:16.
Two short bookends around two long pieces, with the ordinary length songs doing the work in between. For a band who have spent thirty five years moving away from where they started without ever announcing a change of direction, that is a familiar and deliberate architecture.
Solar Will and Tales of Trees have both been out for a while, which means roughly a quarter of the album is already public and the parts nobody has heard are the long ones. That is the opposite of how most records are trailed, and on this evidence it is the right way round.