Ulver: A Sputnik Guide

This feature is part of a hopefully ongoing series aimed at exploring the discographies of interesting and/or important bands whose wider body of work is often overlooked on this site. There will be lots of words and a few pictures, but the main deal is that if a band features here, they are good and you should listen to them! And if you already jam them, hit up the comments and explain where and why this is wrong! Get going!

Previously covered discographies:

Stereolab・Sweet Trip・Blonde Redhead・Slowdive

The news broke today that Tore Ylwizaker, member of Ulver since 1997, died three days ago on his 54th birthday. Though credited as a ‘keyboardist’, Ylwizaker was absolutely essential to everything the group made since he joined: without his contributions, it’s unthinkable that Ulver would have emerged from their early years as a metal band as a such a stunningly proficient juggling act between IDM and downtempo — and then onto drone, onto classical, onto full-tilt synthpop, and anything they could fold into the margins of their umpteen strong suits. Ulver’s name has practically become a by-word for versatility, but for me this was always underpinned by a rigorous sense of competence, which, in turn, I viewed as practically synonymous with Ylwizaker. His passing marks a great loss for forward-thinking music as a whole, and we are privileged to be able to hear his talent across so many guises.

This blog is dedicated to Tore Ylwizaker’s work and memory, and would likely never have been published if this opportunity, however tragic, had never arisen. I began writing it in either 2020 or 2021 with a view to completing and publishing it as swiftly as possible, but minor setbacks, subsequently released albums, the loss of a laptop, and (for an embarrassingly long time), my own ignorance that the original, mostly-finished draft was recoverable from cloud storage put paid to this. It is strange returning to it now: even by my standards today, I was surprised at how verbose and irreverent sections of the original draft were. I’ve toned this down in sections, but as the aim now is very much not to make even more of a mountain from a molehill, a full redraft was unfortunately not on the cards.

Ulver’s discography is vast. In order to simplify it somewhat and keep this a feasible venture, I initially opted to exclude live albums (other than those featuring original material or reworks) and compilations, but I would like to apologise for the omission of both Childhood’s End (2012) and Scary Muzak (2021), both of which warrant a place here and have been failed by my intermittent work ethic. Many thanks to my colleague garas for ensuring that the early demo Vargnatt (1993) did not meet the same fate.

My original plans for this feature included no material for an introduction beyond the following quote from Ulver’s founder Kristoffer Rygg (aka Garm), which I think is one of the most revealing and pertinent comments available for Ulver, both to their inception as a metal act and to everything they would go on to achieve. I’ll let it speak for itself:

“I still consider myself a Satanist, although I don’t boast about it because the philosophy is so simple […] In my opinion rebellion against Christianity and all the concrete acts is cheap, it is more challenging to try to create something better which will displace all the age-old traditions and institutions.” — Garm, 2005

Vargnatt (1993)

Vargnatt is a neglected release, which simply doesn’t get enough love, even though it is a very enjoyable piece of history to say the least. Beyond the historical aspects from being Ulver’s first proper release (let us forget that ‘93 Rehearsal), this demo interestingly foreshadowed their most well-known folk-black phase between ’95 and ’97, showing the very first roots of their style. It contains a little bit of everything from “The Trilogie”, like the riffs similar to what you can hear years later on Nattens Madrigal (for example in the song with the same title on this demo), but the first signs of experimentation can be observed which distinguished them from other black metal bands back in those days. For example in Tragediens Trone or in Ulverytternes Kamp the clean guitars met interesting chorus effects and the addition of acoustic melodies, which brings a certain melancholic feel into those songs. Furthermore the inclusion of a full acoustic song, Trollskogen, is also a notable innovation – like a charming little piece taken from Kveldssanger. The odd combination of clean and harsh vocals by Garm are also an obvious sign of the band’s aim for originality. However, this vocal style is probably the most negative aspect in the album, because I believe Garm simply hadn’t found his style yet, and from time to time his high-pitched clean sections sound very awkward. The drumming and studio work also could use some amelioration, but we can’t expect such an early demo to be perfect. The most important thing to note from Vargnatt is that everything was on the right path right from the very beginning, and Ulver showed great potential in this very early stage too. In my humble opinion, this demo is an unpolished diamond in their discography, and deserves some love too. — garas

Bergtatt (1995)

We start with a letter. Ulver being the innovators that they are and always have been, that letter is not A, but B. B is for Bergtatt, and, according to this revolutionary new metric, Bergtatt is for B-tier Ulver.

This is going to be fun.

Bergtatt is an iconic release by any standards: its incorporation of folk into the black metal genome has been vastly influential for the genre as a whole, and even I can tell why without reading up on Ulverpedia.com (my experience with trad black metal is very much a day-trip affair). This album that looks awesome on paper – Garm kicks the album off with a highly melodious operatic Gregorian warble, the album has an engaging narrative (young maiden wanders into a forest, ends up in clutches of twisted mountainfolk — did we mention this was a Norwegian band?), we get flutes and female vocals incorporated during the clean sections, and there are no church-burning eye-rollers to be had.

Authentic black metal with none of the baggage, in other words – but who are they going to impress with that? Black metal fans? Pfft! A lot about this record feels overly primitive: the tracks frequently rely on crudely segued composite structures that don’t match up to the level of the album’s epic scope, and it has a classic case of that black metal/neofolk syndrome where you can successfully guess the next note or chord nine times out of ten and the drama-suspense-stakes struggle as a result – it’s hard to stay gripped when you feel you’ve already heard half the album on first pass, and I’m uncertain whether repeat listens mitigate or compound this. The band explores lo-fi field recordings to mixed effect: the infamous THUNDERCLAP is obviously kickass, but “Capitel III: Graablick Blev Hun Vaer” cuts out midway for an impressively unhelpful soundscape that takes up a steep fraction (1/17th!) of the album’s 34-minute runtime. Later on, “Capitel IV” flexes the band’s folk credentials with a semi-haunting, semi-listless acoustic break that cements good ol’ Bergtatt with what we in post-Brexit Britain refer to as ‘major fucking pacing issues’. Having read a translation of the lyrics, I get that this track is meant to convey a wavering back-and-forth between the frail protagonist and the beguiling voice of the mountain men before she makes the wrong choice and all is woe and ruin, but can wavering back-and-forths truly waver when they land like deadweights?

If all this blasphemy against the blackened septum sanctum of canonical metal feels like I have something to prove here, then, uh, yes? Bergtatt is an occasionally gripping and frequently bemusing attempt at an ambitious work of atmosphere, suggesting from the onset that Ulver’s most fruitful output would lie well beyond the realm of black metal. Any veneration of Ulver’s black metal tenure that neglects their subsequent career is for fools overly impressed by scrappy theatrics, in no scenario is Bergtatt an outright bad album! It has a ton of great and noble qualities: “Capitel II: Soelen Gaaer Bag Aase Need” is a stunner that captures everything impressive about Ulver’s melodic take on metal in six-and-a-half delicious minutes, and I’ll be damned if “Capitel V: Bergtatt – Ind I Fjeldkamrene” isn’t every inch the chilling finale the the narrative demanded. There’s a lot to love here, and it definitely lands an iconic opening statement – hell, Ulver were still in their teens when this dropped. Listen to it, if you haven’t already (unlikely!?) – and then listen to everything else the band put out, because this is but one fish in a fishy, fishy sea.

Tracks you need in your life: “Capitel II”, “Capitel V”

B

Kveldssanger (1996)

The second instalment in Ulver’s black metal Trilogie, Kveldssanger is primarily notable for not in fact being a black metal album. Allergen alert: neofolk! This album feels like a note of pronounced non-apology for the likes of Bergtatt’s “Capitel IV” by way of the band saying uh, we could have made a totally killer folk record all along, so any results-may-vary material on our debut was wholly justified. Hmm. 

By and large, this album belongs to guitarist Håvard Jørgensen, whose simplistic, dignified, classical pluckings are the core and often sole component of most tracks. The album lives and dies on the strength of his melodies, which are sometimes gorgeous and melancholic (“Halling”) and other times so bland you’d think he rolled out of bed hungover and played the first arpeggios that came to mind (“Naturmystikk”, “Hiertets Vee”). Garm experiments pretty convincingly with layering his clean vocals, especially in the opener “Østenfor Sol Og Vestenfor Maane“, one of the most melodically rich tracks from this era of Ulver, but this leads to a several of indulgent moments of studio gimmickry (“Al Capella”, “Ord”). Unsurprisingly, he has since commented that the album was largely written on the go in the studio, hence its deconstructive approach to songcraft and – mainly – its fragmentary tracklist. Too many of these compositions are bitty stop-starts for any atmosphere to sustain itself across the whole record.

This is a shame, because Kveldssanger packs stirring highlights! “Nattleite” is a riveting showcase of the record’s potential, both in its haunting tone and its incorporation of what sounds suspiciously like clean electric guitar harmonics chiming in the background. Not only were this band switched on enough to use acoustic guitars in metal tracks, but they also brought their electrics to their folk sessions? Nice. “Nattleite” is the only track here to do interesting work with timbre, and it shows up many of its fellows for barking up the wrong tree. I can see Kveldssanger‘s reflective tone appealing strongly to many people, but it’s a classic case of too little substance spread too thinly by a bright band who hadn’t yet nailed down their methodology. Using the studio space as a focal part of the writing and wider creative processes would be critical to Ulver’s future output, and so Kveldssanger is probably best viewed as an immature yet harmless scenario of the band cutting their teeth.

Tracks you need in your life: “Nattleite”,  “Østenfor Sol Og Vestenfor Maane”, “Halling”, “Høyfjeldsbilde”

C

Nattens Madrigal (1997)

Nattens Madrigal is famously the fiercest, horriblest, unlistenablest thing to come out of any era of Ulver. Supposedly recorded on a tape recorder in a forest (bet), this one is an unrelenting surge of lo-fi black metal that affords its listener precisely one pause for breath, devilishly placed a single minute into the first song. It might be their least listener-friendly, but it’s their best metal output. Contrary to Bergtatt‘s structural foibles, Nattens‘ corrosive aesthetic camouflages easily the tightest songwriting on any Ulver release from the ’90s, and the record holds up track-to-track on a level that their other output from this era falls short of. The band attack each track with a laser focus, putting in deceptively slick performances and elevating the album’s relatively spartan writing into a firm foundation for unabating intensity.

Relentlessly intense it may be, but Nattens Madrigal is almost as averse to homogeneity as Bergtatt. These tracks cover a respectable range of tones, with “IV”‘s melodic flurry and “VI”‘s triumphant climax punctuating the album’s tone like respective moon- and sun-light laying waste the darkest of nights. Unlike Kveldssanger‘s scattergun folk memos, each track here is independently convincing, with the one significant exception of “VII”‘s tremolo-fuelled borefest; unlike Bergtatt, there is little doubt that this amounts to a seamless whole, each track ratcheting up the stakes on how much the listener can sit through like a masochistic endurance test. The feeling of relief as “VIII” finally exhausts the album’s firestorm is immensely well-earned, and Ulver compensate for their harsh production and breakneck pacing by peppering the album with the best riffs of their career. It’s all here – Nattens is certainly a tough swallow, but Ulver could hardly have taken black metal any further. It’s so good that it saves me having to make an obnoxious if you came here because Ulver are a black metal band, then… -type disclaimer. Fuck that. This is the exactly kind of statement you should aim to make before closing the book on a genre.

Tracks you need in your life: “I”, “IV”, “VI”, “VIII”

A 

Themes from William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1998)

Yikes, there’s a lot to unpack here. Rebranded from Garm to Trickster G., Rygg decides that it’s time for Ulver to stop being a black metal band; producer/composer Tore Ylwizaker (henceforth Rygg’s right hand man) is brought into the fray to kickstart the band’s deep-dive into electronic; a slew of genres are combined in a liquid state, and a new sound is born! This album is the origin story for everything Ulver has been and done since, both an assertion of the scope they wished to achieve and a tease at the palette they would use to reach it.

To that end, Themes… is fascinating for its genre fusion, veering from industrial to ambient to psychedelic to breakbeat with all the logic of free association, each style individually well accounted for and competently performed. It should be cluttered and choppy – and in some ways it is! – but where the skeleton of immature metal songwriting often failed Bergtatt’s merge of styles, Themes… is abstract enough to liberate itself from such conventions altogether; its atmosphere is pervasive enough that its genre mishmash feels largely cogent throughout.

Things get rough when the concept and vocals enter the frame. Rygg’s cleans are rightly considered one of Ulver’s hottest commodities, but he adopts a melodramatic and occasionally operatic tone for his Blake recital reminiscent of Trent Reznor at his most overblown and cringe-inducing. This, coupled with stylised spoken word excerpts and the (here misplaced) gravitas demanded by Blake’s theological subject matter, completely undermines the adventurous scope of the album’s instrumental side and gives it the overall flavour of overbearing pretentious slurry. The album’s hundred-minute runtime fares predictably badly; Rygg joked in interview that this was meant to give the listener time for a midway food break, but I think it would have been more consider of him the designate the most appropriate stretches of the tracklist for napping (having fallen asleep to this record on multiple occasions, my advice is strictly impartial). The album draws on a wealth of ideas, but the intrigue and abstraction necessitated for this kind of musical experimentation are undermined at every turn by the cheap theatre of its concept’s delivery.

Weighed down by all this, Themes… narrowly edges out Kveldssanger as the worst Ulver LP, but it wears that label as a badge of honour: it’s their worst record because it does too much, it tries too hard, and is too eager to reinvent itself. It’s ambitious beyond what Ulver, or any band really, could have ever been expected to deliver. For all the many, many flaws in this Medusa’s hair of a tracklist, I don’t think it’s possible to look back at this record after over two decades of experimentation, polish and refinement and say that a single damaging misstep was made here – Ulver were wading against the current of their own ambitions, and every awkward moment is vindicated several times over by the mastery they came out clutching the other side. Themes… made it that much easier for Ulver to alienate the edgy hell out of their black metal fanbase and stride out into a new world of possibilities.

Tracks you need in your life: honestly, you’re allowed to skip this one

D 

Metamorphosis (1999)

Of course there was going to be an Ulver release called Metamorphosis. While that title would have made more sense for Themes…, it’s appropriate here insofar as Ulver underwent a major roster change, completely abandoning the band lineup of their previous albums. This EP is basically Rygg and Ylwizaker getting cosy together in the studio and pinning down a few ambient and/or techno numbers that would serve as a much more stable basis for their future style than anything on Themes…. Original axe-man Jørgensen is also on board for programming duties but he didn’t stick around as a full-time member for much longer, and I don’t believe we ever hear from the rest of the Themes… or Nattens gang again. As Rygg delicately put it in 2005:

“The other members [of pre-Metamorphosis Ulver] still play metal, but they weren’t talented enough to make electronic music.” 

…and there you have it. Making electronic music: this is what Ulver does now. Very cool!

And it is cool! Opener “Of Wolves & Vibrancy” is a bona fide techno banger, as close as anything you’ll find on pre-synthpop Ulver to a wholesale Bop, while “Gnosis” and “Limbo Central (Theme from Perdition City)” are effectively a two-song charting of the ground they’d cover the following year on guess-which-album. The closer “Of Wolves & Withdrawal” is an ambient longhaul that falls a little flat, but otherwise these four tracks are solid stuff that makes for a worthwhile, if not particularly revelatory appendix for any returning Perdition City denizens, and a solid preview to that album’s hallucinatory configurations of concrete and darkness for anyone else.

Metamorphosis‘ failing is that it doesn’t rise above the sum of its parts, and that while the parts in question are functional – credible, even – they’re still unremarkable compared to their new peers (though as far as Aphex Twin fetishes go, I’ve heard worse). I once promised myself I’d jam this outside of the novelty of it being Ulver’s first electronic release, but the fact that this has never once come to pass in the multiple years since this piece was originally drafted tells its own story. If Perdition City is the band’s own take on Amon Tobin and The Future Sound of London, this scans more as somewhat pretentious fan-fiction – and hence the sleeve notes’ leaden claim that

Ulver is obviously not a black metal band and does not wish to be stigmatized as such. […] If this discourages you in any way, please have the courtesy to refrain from voicing superficial remarks regarding our music and/or personae.

No more metal shade from now on, then.

Tracks you need in your life: “Of Wolves & Vibrancy”, “Gnosis”

B– 

Perdition City (2000)

As has been uncontroversially established by practically all Ulver fans at this point, Perdition City marked a quantum leap forward for Ulver’s electronic output, and established a gold standard against which all of their non-metal output would be held. We’re half on familiar trip-hop territory and half in the land of noir and thriller OSTs, but the intersections between the two are often unpredictable, uneasy and disarmingly original, as evidenced immediately on the mazelike songwriting that underpins the standout opener “Lost in Moments”. Though the heavy kitsch that left such a reek on Themes… is still on the periphery (as it would be on all future Ulver records), the band had found more sophisticated, evasive strategies to harness it: “Lost in Moments” and “Dead City Centres” are disconcerting not only because their clattering beats, sinister jazz integrations and vocal murmuration tell you they are, but because their winding progressions keeps their overall trajectory murky. You have to listen closely and suspend a decent part of your disbelief to get the best of these tracks, but the band’s knack for a good payoff and the polish of Ylwizaker’s programming are more generous than the album’s frigid overtones may suggest. 

Beyond that, Ulver make magic by leaning into the cinematic. “Porn Piece Or The Scars Of Cold Kisses” does a sublime job of bringing them melancholy Scandi overtones to what in another timeline could easily have been lounge-ready downtempo: these tracks make for a stunning opening pairing that firmly repudiated any lingering doubts over whether Ulver could bring a unique voice to electronic music. A little later, “Hallways of Always” and the climactic “Future Sound of Music” suggest that they can play linear spook just as well, while “Tomorrow Never Knows” foreshadows their work on Teachings in Silence by playing hard to get for a good six minutes before pivoting into a mournful coda that provides not a speck of resolution and sounds all the better for it: unease and understatement are just as potent as head-on gratification, it seems. The album famously falters a little in its second half, its backend packed with comparatively intermittent cuts and the dystopian closer “Nowhere/Catastrophe” a little too hammed-up in its lyricism and vocal delivery to provide quite the denouement it aims for. Not quite a perfect album then, but so excellent in the areas that matter most that there’s no need to keep score – and even if we go there anyway, that exceptional opening run clocks in at over half an hour, while the remaining tracks take up an inoffensive 18 minutes. We’ll chalk that up as a triumph.

Tracks you need in your life: “Lost in Moments”, “Porn Piece”, “Hallways of Always”, “Tomorrow Never Knows”, “The Future Sound of Music”

S

Teachings in Silence (2002)

Okay, I said no compilationss and meant it, but we’re going to make a superexciting exception here because 1) Teachings In Silence was originally released as two EPs and I can’t be bothered to do two write-ups where I could do one, 2) these songs work perfectly on a shared tracklist and 3) they are awesome and the prospect of neglecting them because of their release format is a dumb one (don’t you dare apply this logic to any of the releases I willfully left out).

Two major developments: firstly, Jørn H. Sværen joined the collective, rounding off the holy trinity of core membership that endures to this day (and beyond!), and secondly, our noble roster of boys took their computers and took a shot at ambient glitch. Their ratio was approx. 85% ambient, 15% glitch, and it turned out to be well-judged because Teachings in Silence is a lowkey highlight of the Ulververse.

As Perdition City emphatically mapped out (and as we’ll see again later), our gang of techy wolfboys tend to do themselves proud when they make their ballpark a minimal one, and Teachings in Silence is just about their most pared back release on offer in that respect. Get to the end of this one, and at least half of it will feel like total emptiness, but it’s a horrible beautiful mournful soul-sucking emotional void that will increase your spiritual bleakness to an unhealthy extent and make you thank the band for it!?! That’s what crafty OSTmongering is all about; there’s no affected pathos here, just ultra-sparse soundscapes, the most unextravagant of ceaselessly repeated motifs, occasional glitchy flickers, and the ghost of Rygg’s voice. His vocals are notable chiefly for their absence, showing up briefly, it at all in each track as though to underline how much he and the rest of the group are holding back here. 

“Not Saved” is the comp’s poster-child, a two-bar loop of a not particularly thrilling melody that plays out over ten whole minutes of spartan moroseness, its pulse sustained and eventually disintegrated by a sample of clanging bells that will haunt you for days after you’ve forgotten everything else about it. This ties in my main almost-complaint here – a relatively slim number of actively striking ideas in proportion to the time and patience this one demands – but its melancholy superpowers come with a time-stopping side effect that renders the release’s length and pacing mostly irrelevant. Don’t miss this!

Tracks you need in your life: “Not Saved”, “Darling Didn’t We Kill You?”

A- 

Lyckantropen Themes (2002)

It was only a matter of time before Ulver graduated from making fake film music to making real film music, and, uh, Lyckantropen Themes is that release. It’s a rare moment in the Ulver discog that could very easily be second-guessed from its chronological placement and contextual outline, right down to the sum of its parts: where the group’s Future Sound of London and Amon Tobin (“Theme 9” and “Theme 10”, my goodness) worship was once naked and cinematic, here it is nakeder, cinematicker and ambient-in-a-way-that-suggests-a-moody-backdrop-to-just-about-anything–er. Its take on the sound is awesome and reminds me of more artists I like than ever: work a few subtle beats into the likes of “Theme 3” and “Theme 5”, and you’re a stone’s throw away from the ambient techno and microhouse mastered respectively by Vladislav Delay and Jan Jelinek. Can’t knock Ulver’s taste in electronic music at all, but these pieces, essentially extended ambient loops, lack the same depth in layering or subtle progressions as their source texts, trailing on too nebulously for their role as a soundtrack to have much bearing on a standalone listen. They might have been used for a vast range of movies and you’d hardly know the difference. They do make up for this with the band’s knack for ghoulish noir on the melodic end of things, but it’s still hardly their most distinct outing. The question here is not so much more whether this holds up as viable mood music – I’d warrant pretty much anyone could get some mileage out of it! – but more whether you have any better options on the cards.

Tracks you need in your life: “Theme 3”, “Theme 5”, “Theme 8”

B

A Quick Fix of Melancholy (2003)

This shit is hella extra. Whatever Perdition City‘s “interior film” was about (you tell me, hurr), it’s a lot less interior here. A Quick Fix of Melancholy saw Ulver advance their electronic and ambient palette into more immediate territory, with a few sideshow bursts of experimentation for good measure. This is how evolution works: a new form is put forward, everyone has cause for excitement, and then most of the alterations are swiftly forgotten because they fail to improve on the original (“Eitttlane”), are eclipsed by future advancements (“Doom Sticks”), or are too aberrent to leave a legacy (“Vowels”).

The evolutionary chain ultimately vindicates this one, however: where the Metamorphosis EP was effectively a trailer for Perdition City, this one anticipates Blood Inside. As we shall see, Blood Inside is not the kind of album anyone could easily anticipate, and so A Quick Fix of Melancholy only correlates up to a point – but rest assured that this EP is full of:

• Rygg doing things with his voice including but not limited to abruptly destabilising his own melodies mid-measure (jump scare!)
• strings doing things included but not limited to unsettling pizzicato counter-melodies 
• full-toned mid-happy synths doing things absolutely droning ominously and urgently(?) because atmosphere has earned the right to actively command your attention span and it’s about time everyone acknowledged this!

A juicy crucible for sure, but I’ll be cruel and say there’s only one firm keeper here, and that it’s the edge-of-your seat opener “Little Blue Bird”, a thrilling edge-of-your-seat horror house at atmospherically compelling as it is convincing as a production showcase. The EP’s novelty value goes up considerably when you consider that it houses not one but two inferior versions of #1 tracks on their respective LPs: “Eitttleite” is an electronic revision of Kveldssanger‘s “Nattleite”, while “Doom Sticks” later became the masterful psychedelic creepfest “Moody Stix” from ATGCLVLSSCAP. This is worth highlighting because what ‘inferior’ means here has a helpful bearing on Ulver’s whole discography: this band has plenty of material that you won’t find yourself reaching for so actively once you’ve got it under your belt, but if you found any of these tracks crawling out of your local radio station on a dark night, you’d count yourself blessed. Or terrified. Attention-commanding ambient be like that sometimes.

Tracks you need in your life: “Little Blue Bird”

B– 

Svidd Negar (2004)

Ulver’s second soundtrack, this time for a movie with a title best left untranslated and distinctly more score-esque than Lyckantropen Themes‘ album-shaped ambient moodboard! You will find yourself visualising scenes upon exposure to these pieces, and they will feature a variety of specific beats, courtesy of the swelling strings on “Preface”, the Satie-esque piano sprinklings on “Ante Andante”, the horns on “Surface”, the uneasy pizz/legato interplay on the showstopper “Waltz of King Karl”, and the gorgeous motif and counter-melodies in “Comedown”/”WIld Cat”. Beyond the diversity of the instrumental palette accounted for on that list, Ulver’s growth as composers is palpable here – this is the first real taste we got of the melodic subtlety we’d end up hearing so much of on Shadows of the Sun and Messe I.X-VI.X, but you can also tie it into the band’s studio evolution as a foreshadowing of Blood Inside‘s bombast (the rollicking fusion of brass and electronic on both “Rock Massif”s is a portent here).

Svidd Negar‘s descent from breathtakingly delicate arrangements into increasingly erratic increments of grandiose violence is intricately laid out for sure, but the bite-size OST format together with its frequently foregrounded contingency on a visual counterpart restricts it from being able to compete with Ulver’s top-notch LPs, which the craft of these pieces is otherwise on par with – and yet, in spite of that, this release tells a more vivid and engaging story than Bergtatt. One of Ulver’s more overlooked gems, do not pass this one by.

Tracks you need in your life: “Comedown”, “Surface”, “Preface”, “Wheel of Conclusion”, “Waltz of King Karl”

B+

Blood Inside (2005)

Blood Inside fucks. There’s a general tendency for Ulver’s more minimal works to have a much higher hit rate, but this album shrugs off that pattern along with pretty much any other convention or label you can throw at it. It’s a maximalist freakhouse; it does everything, and it does it bombastically and grippingly in a way that no other Ulver really comes close to (skip ahead to Wars of the Roses to find out why). Blood Inside is like a rock opera made with an electronic and cinematic vocabularies, and while some might see it as too overblown as such, I cannot stress the excitement and mystery on this one hard enough.

It’s also their hardest album to put into words, due largely to the breadth and bizarreness of sounds on offer here. One minute you’re in an ominous drone soundscape (“Dressed In Black”), the next you’re in a weave of cascading beats and plummeting strings (“Christmas”), the next you’re in the best song Nine Inch Nails never wrote (“For the Love of God”), then suddenly you’re in such unstable territory that any of the previous tracks feel like concrete normalcy (“The Truth”). Blood Inside fares well in eclectic territory. It owns kitsch like nothing else in the group’s arsenal (“In the Red”), it boasts the most striking of their why and how would you write this moments (“It Is Not Sound”) and it even finds the time to iron out one of their most delicately crafted sentimental tracks towards the end (“Your Call”). 

All of this, and more, applies in spades to the album highlight “Blinded By Blood”. This song is an absolutely staggering futureballad that amplifies everything Ulver explored with spacing and glitch on Teachings In Silence to its most overwhelming and tops it off with the most powerful vocal performance Rygg has ever given on an Ulver record. I’ve never heard anything quite like this; the way it drifts from comforting minimalism to sorrowful crooning in familiar tones to abrupt, alien inflections and jumps of melody, only to come back again and again to a cyclical mallet motif that somehow completes the song despite feeling completely out of place. That bloody mallet motif, fuck me – every time I hear it, it shifts through my memories and pulls out a slew of disconnected but consistently meaningful experiences that this song has absolutely no business attaching itself to; it’s the kind of music that makes you feel things you otherwise would never know how to feel. It’s phenomenal. This is the best Ulver song, and let no-one tell you otherwise; they have a respectable number of songs that hold up as perfect, but nothing else in their discography hits quite the same highs as this one.

Blood Inside is not a complete success story across the board – “The Truth” is almost unlistenably tangled, and I can’t say I’d ever listen to “Operator”‘s lurching ambulance superdrama outside of sequencing – but on the whole it finally realises Themes…;’ dream of crafting an unashamedly bold album that actively benefits from the disparity of the many, many unexpected decisions made from minute to minute. This is sensational stuff and you have no absolutely no excuse for missing it. My favourite Ulver in spite of everything.

Tracks you need in your life: Blinded By Blood, For the Love of God, Dressed In Black, Your Call, In the Red, Christmas

S

Shadows of the Sun (2007)

With Blood Inside, the exception that proves all rules, out of the way, it is time to return to the firm truth that ambient Ulver tends to be best Ulver. One of the few consistencies between pretty much everyone who enjoys this band in any form is that Shadows Of The Sun is either the best thing the group ever did with a minimalistic palette or, at least, very close to the top of the pile. Ever-competent, Ylwizaker took a year off took study classical composition in anticipation of making the album, and the new touches he brought to Ulver’s palette and songwriting are immediately apparent: Shadows… by and large foregoes the respective kitsch and horror of Perdition City and Blood Inside in favour of by far the most sombre overtones Ulver had explored at the time (I would argue it remains unmatched in that regard): the likes of “All the Love”, opening centrepiece “Eos”, and the lonesome purr of fantastically well-gauged Black Sabbath cover “Solitude” all engage with melancholy with a subtlety previously absent outside of “Blinded by Blood” – edgy suspense gives way to creeping gloom, concerted acts of chiaroscuro take on the depth and translucence of a bona fide wraith.

At points this tends towards the sinister: “Funebre” and the final minute of the title-track will cloud every window in your house. However, the album’s darkness tends to feed into a more tragic reverie. Garm’s lyrics address grief and passing; his voice is hushed as a prayer, almost deferential in their reluctance to break the album’s quietude; the band’s dour chamber instrumentals are so understated that his every breath finds itself spotlit. Solitude and reflection are the orders of the day here. This isn’t quite borne out perfectly – the skittish piano frittery and glib lyricism of “Like Music” is an unflattering placement back-to-back with “Vigil”‘s amorphous progression and initially extraneous Fennesz feature (although the man does contribute a notably contorted glitchy finale) – but this is still a remarkable and arguably unique record for what it does accomplish.

Although Shadows of the Sun is all but universally loved, I find it one of the hardest Ulver albums to discuss. Almost everything the group had released up to this point played as a spectacle, an experiment, a sequence of suspenseful things-that-happen. You can chart this one in the same way if you need to (see “Let the Children Go”‘s fleeting jolt of urgency), but more than anything else, this atmosphere suggests without revealing. It’s deeper (though less thrilling) than Perdition City‘s moody soundtrack, and I find that a full listen exerts such emotional demands that this arguably has the least replay value of Ulver’s great works: hearing the “Eos” reprise in the outro of “What Happened?” is like watching the sun that set on the start of the album rise the other side of a sleepless night, and I find myself too drained by the experience for this to scan as joy. Just don’t be put off; this is as thoughtful and enriching as dark nights of the soul come. 

Tracks you need in your life: “Funebre”, “What Happened?”, “Eos”, “Solitude”, “All the Love” 

A+

Wars of the Roses (2011)

A loose spiritual successor to the drama and eclecticism of Blood Inside, Wars of the Roses saw Ulver open their arms to guitarist Danny O’Sullivan and double down on their most robust shapes and sounds in a hot minute; it’s certainly the most ‘rock’ release they put out since the William Blake album. The results often approach excellence, as on the riveting opener “February MMX” with its alluring chord changes and thrill sequence of a chorus, but they all too often come off as undercooked teasings of ideas that never pan out to their full potential. “England” is a forgettable traipse that stitches two equally cursive themes together without delivering a lasting impact from either, “September IV” pivots from a legitimately stirring miniepic into an unnecessary coda that could have come straight out of Blood Inside‘s b-sides, and “Norwegian Gothic” comes to an abrupt end as soon as its disjointed ominousness begins to find form.

These tracks all feel strangely piecemeal coming from Ulver, but they do have a respectable continuity of tone. True to its title, this album has a stately, historical atmosphere with undertones of tragedy and violence, but while this gives its more concise cuts an approachable sense of character and intrigue, it turns to ham in its longer outings. “Providence” stuffs a disguise, discernment and destiny narrative into corny melodies and concertedly profound lyrical pairings, ending up as an awkward mess rather than the starry epic of vitality it so clearly tries to be, while “Stone Angels” reaches for somewhat more respectably into existential ambient territory. It’s certainly more convincing in and of itself, but this isn’t quite sufficient to justify monopolising a solid third of the album’s runtime for a nap-fuelling final statement that doesn’t feel stylistically cogent with any of the preceding tracks. This may have fared better as a standalone release. The ‘true’ closer for me comes with the album highlight “Island”, a fragile Nietzschean meditation that flows beautifully and draws itself out to a satisfying extent before slipping away into delicate percussive nothingness. As far as one-song vindications of entire albums go, this one is almost sufficient, and with “February MMX” to back it up, Wars of the Roses is just about worth your while. As far as hit-or-miss Ulver records go, you could do worse.

Tracks you need in your life: “February MMX”, “Island”

B-

Messe I.X-VI.X (2013)

If Wars of the Roses was a sort-of not-really spiritual successor to Blood Inside, Messe I.X-VI.X follows on from Shadows of the Sun (i.e. minimal, (some might say ambient!), steeped in classical influence, extremely excellent). The parallels end there: Shadows is a beautiful, cinematic ambient voyage about despair and depression, but Messe is a dark, tense orchestral hybrid commissioned as real life literal mass by the Tromsø Kulturhus. How cool is that!? Thanks to the commission, Ulver now have an orchestra’s worth of firepower behind them, yet those expecting them to stretch it to the most overblown limits of its potential and crack out William Blake: The Musical would do well to hold their horses: excepting one maximalist crescendo in the centrepiece “Son of Man”, Messe is one of the most understated works in Ulver’s canon. I want to call it their most sophisticated release, but this is perhaps a little contestable (I dare you to contest it).

There are two ways to approach this album: the easygoing Catholic way of tracing its shape in nice clear broad-strokes moments around where Rygg sings on “Son of Man” and everything gets very loud, and then around the appropriately clement wind-down when he signs again on “Mother of Mercy”, or the woke aestheticist’s way of shrugging off the obvious rises and falls as superfluous whateverness and leaning more into the tracks that best showcase the album’s extraordinarily slick interplay between orchestral and electronic sounds, most notably “Shri Schneider” and “Glamour Box (Ostinati).” Because Messe is at once a Mass and an edgy ambient album made by competent Satanists, both approaches are valid and essential. You’ve got to hold your breath and pay attention to the small touches to get the most out of this one, otherwise how are you supposed to cope with those eleven opening minutes of first track “As Syrians Pour In, Lebanon Grapples with Ghosts of a Bloody Past”, where Ulver’s delicate string arrangement slowly digs its nails into its palms in anticipation of one gorgeous final minute of melodic resolution before the album begins in earnest. 

Tracks like this and the dark ambient creepfest “Noche Oscura del Alma” are just the beginning of reasons why Messe will probably never be hailed as one of Ulver’s consensus favourite; anyone approaching it solely as a tension/release affair will be disappointed by how firmly it prioritises the former over the latter, and its focus on wavering dynamics and intricate arrangements leads it to avoid nurturing that melancholy tone that runs more prominently through Ulver’s more visible classics. This might be a reasonable excuse for some people, but not me – Messe is absolutely top tier Ulver and, while less emotional than Shadows of the Sun, is one of their most impressive and intelligently crafted releases. Don’t you dare sleep on it!

Tracks you need in your life: “Glamour Box (Ostinati)”, “Shri Schneider”, “Son of Man”

A

ATGCLVLSSCAP (2016)

This is a bit of a sleeper in the scheme of Ulver LPs. Mistakenly considered a wholesale live album, it’s a serious of studio mixes culled, trimmed and enhanced from an extensive range of multitrack live recordings made from twelve improv-heavy shows. On the one hand, it’s a tech-head’s answer to the future of the studio album, on the other hand it’s a set of ‘curated pieces’ assembled in a way not dissimilar to the legendary final two Talk Talk records. Either way, it straddles the line between studio and live records, can be approached as either, and sets out the approach that the band would use for similar hybrid records Drone Activity (2019) and Hexahedron (2021), making it a welcome new arm of their craft (all more so when you consider that Ulver had never played live until 2009, excluding one performance in their very early days, and that this album was recorded from 2014 shows). 

Musically, ATGCLVLSSCAP is (still) the most pick ‘n’ mix Ulver have sounded since Blood Inside, though that album’s morbid grandeur is foregone in favour of a wispier strain of psychedelia: the bulk of the album is concerned with incense-heavy rock jams (“Cromagnosis” and “Om Hanumate Namah” are poster children here) or with new age -adjacent ambient/drone. The latter will be the probable make-or-break factor for fresh listeners, particularly given how resolutely the TWENTY SOMETHING MINUTE triple threat of “Desert/Dawn”, “D-Day Drone” and the admittedly gorgeous “Gold Beach” haemorrhages its mid-section. Ulver pepper the tracklist with just enough song-shaped highlights from past albums to reward those who would self-describe as patient (Messe’s “Glamour Box (Ostinati)” returns as “Glammer Hammer”, and Perdition City’s “Nowhere (Catastrophe)” rounds off the record’s midway lacuna as “Nowhere (Sweet Sixteen)”, a situationally triumphant raise on the kitsch original) – but really, this one has far more to offer those who actively enjoy drifting with the tide. The two greatest tracks here – the eerie jam “Moody Stix” (returned from A Quick Fix of Melancholy‘s “Doom sticks) and the hebraic meditation “Ecclestiates (A Vernal Catnap)” – are fiercely atmosphere-driven, both flexing resplendent group chemistry over repetitive motifs. These songs never shift their footing, but you’d better believe they’ll take you places. “Moody Stix” is arguably the most engrossing piece Ulver ever performed with guitars, while “Ecclesiastes” provides a perfect platform for one of Garm’s most luxuriant vocal offerings to date (not to mention a cogent reprise of the chord loop in the coda of “Tomorrow Never Knows”, but that’s getting into deep cuts). Both are essential, but benefit from album context. 

Evaluating this one overall is tricky: I think most people would agree that it’s a successful experiment, houses at least a handful of superb tracks, and makes for an essential detour for anyone whistlestopping latter-day Ulver. It’s an easy release to cherry pick from, but I’m sceptical of how many fans have had it on repeat in the long run – this thing’s pacing is evasive at best, and its lulls perhaps a little too plain to offer much specific appeal to ambient connoisseurs in the way the rest of the album will likely satisfy psych-heads. Stick your nose in for sure, but you’ll have to make your own mind up on this one. 

Tracks you need in your life: “Moody Stix”, “Cromagnosis”, “Gold Beach”, “Nowhere (Sweet Sixteen)”, “Ecclesiastes (A Vernal Catnap)”

B+

Riverhead (2016)

Phwoar baby, Ulver rounded off the full gamut for OST possibilities on this one: if Lyckantropen Themes was a one-size-fits all ambient creeper that just so happened to have a movie attached to it and Svidd Negar packed a suite of pieces that balanced exceptional compititional flourishes against clear cinematic intersections, then Riverhead is their first score that 100% needs a narrative accompaniment to land. It’s hard to fault these pieces without having experienced them in context (not researching that far, sorry gang), but this record alone is a definition of situationally useful/situationally useless. Its alternation between chamber music and gaseous dark ambient is certainly cohesive, but has virtually no points of distinction to offer anyone other than the most flatulently-minded timbre-heads (Stars of the Lid fans, you may eat here). It’s not a total bunk – “IDLE???” deploys its string arrangement to distantly rousing effect, while “Stoke the Fire” and the egregiously titled “Bored of Canada” are pretty enough – but the pickings here are slim at best.

Tracks you need in your life: […]

C–

The Assassination of Julius Caesar (2017)

…and so we come to the obligatory Ulver go synthpop announcement. Wow. Yes. So they did. I never found it a particularly shocking twist given how closely some of their Blood Inside era dipped into a similar palette (you can hear it as far back as “Porn Piece” and “Nowhere” if you really want to), and since The Assassination of Julius Caesar avoids the hubris of later records in this vein and never posits Garm as a wholesale pop vocalist, I’ve always heard it as a Depeche Mode-fuelled effort to flesh out the band’s synth-noir fetish with a little less abstraction and a few more hooks than past ventures. “Angelus Novus” and single “Nemoralia” are great examples of its mission to use pop songwriting as a springboard to more respectively epic and ethereal places than they’d ever have reached if good ol’ pop had been the final destination. The magnetic “Southern Gothic” and somewhat underwhelming “Transverberation” (the closest thing here to a Flowers of Evil track) do lean more heavily into pop-as-you-know-it, with charismatic vocal flourishes and light grooves front and centre. Garm steps up to the mark for the former, with one of very few performances that afford him the glamourous manner of a traditional frontman, but the album thrives better when it lets go of the handlebars and gives the whole band licence to cut loose, whether compositionally or behind their synthesisers.

Highlight “Rolling Stone” smacks as much of the lackadaisical inadvertent-epics of Introspective-era Pet Shop Boys as of Depeche Mode (whose anxious songwriting generally keeps one eye firmly on the clock), exploiting one infectious chorus hook as licence for a pyrotechnic synth finale; the somewhat underrated (and admittedly incongruous) closer “Coming Home” leans way back into Blood Inside‘s dense dramatics, rocketing the album’s suspense factor and offering a structurally oblique spook-out that eschews pop entirely for an impressive finale. Approach this record as an arthouse caper with mostly strong hooks and almost oppressively slick production, and you’ll hardly be disappointed.

It’s missing something, though – where Perdition City, Blood Inside, Shadows of the Sun and Messe hinted at a greater, shiver-inducing form hulking unseen above the odds and ends of their respective tracklists, The Assassination of Julius Caesar is so smothered in gloss and polish that I’ve never drawn anything like the same wonder-at-the-unknown from it. I find it a sum-of-its-parts experience that makes clever use of a slick aesthetic but falls narrowly short of landing a collected statement, and that’s enough to block it from the top shelf. Very high on style, though. 

Tracks you need in your life: “Nemoralia”, “Rolling Stone”, “Southern Gothic”

B+

Sic Transit Gloria Mundi (2017)

An overall endearing companion EP to the Assassination of Julius Cesar, Sic Transit Gloria Mundi sees Ulver digging further into synthpop in (somewhat) brighter, (somewhat) less conspiratorial form. The new balance is not altogether flattering – “Echo Chamber (Room Of Tears)” taps into ’80s cheese for a rousing chorus but struggles to navigate the band’s darker pivots, though the groovier “Bring Out Your Dead” finds a vibrant foundation for Garm’s soapbox poptimism from the get-go (which is seen off with a deliciously catchy synth coda). This one falls just short of “Southern Gothic” for Ulver’s best straight-up pop song. Past that, you’ve got a cute karaoke-adjacent cover of Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s “The Power of Love”, which is the stuff companion EPs are made for in the most ambivalent of senses. Get that highlight and go. Dark reference.

Tracks you need in your life: “Bring Out Your Dead” 

C

Drone Activity (2019)

Drone Activity is another dubiously live live album, recorded in concert and extensively tailored in-studio similarly to ATGCLVLSSCAP. It shares that album’s hi-fi sheen and a decent amount of its atmosphere, but the focus here is more singular: there are drones, they are, indeed, active, and you will be hearing little else for the duration of its many, many minutes. Hanging out in ambient limbo is second nature to Ulver at this point, and they flex it like no-one’s business here. It’s alright.

The first two tracks (that’s half the album) were probably deeply compelling spiritual-aesthetic experiences in concert, but they’re a tiresome warmup act on record; it’s not so much that they leave their studio audience behind as much as they give them very little to keep up with. Neither piece is as interesting as the drones on ATGCLVLSSCAP, and both are twice as long as any of those pieces. “Blood, Fire, Woods, Diamonds” fares considerably better, handlebar-ing its soundscape with a four-to-the-floor beat and successfully channelling its 16-minute runtime into one moment of unbroken tension, but the closer “Exodus” is easily the highlight track. Not that this is a prerequisite for a drone album, but it’s the only piece here that really goes anywhere, shifting gracefully between tones and textures as it first builds to an ethereal shimmer and then sublates into ominous gloom. It’s the only track here evocative or atmospherically rich enough that summing up its mood with a (brief) handful of polysyllables feels inadequate; it’s by far the most dynamically adventurous and melodically engaging part of this record and a firm must for anyone partial to the group’s slower material.

However, “Exodus” is very much the light at the end of a long tunnel. Part of the tragedy of ATGCLVLSSCAP’s conflation with lazy expectations of a regular live album was that it was made to seem like a secondary addition to the Ulver studio canon. For Drone Activity, this is still unfair but not nearly as unfortunate. It explores its palette too extensively to feel like a missed opportunity, but given that Ulver’s ambient work tends to have their highest hit-rate, it’s a little disappointing all the same.

Tracks you need in your life: “Exodus”

C+

Flowers of Evil (2020)

No mincing of words for this one: Flowers of Evil follows on from Assassination… and Sic Transit… for Ulver’s foray into synthpop, but where Assassination… wore pop as one of many layers to suit wider artistic ambitions and Sic Transit… was an innocuous bauble, Flowers of Evil charmlessly overcommits to the style and paints Ulver’s reinvention of pop as serious music in a frankly tedious light.

Opener “One Last Dance” shoots for a majestic with a slow burning destiny-moment, instrumentally note-perfect but vocally sabotage as Garm finally makes a fatal stumble onto the wrong side of the line between kitsch grandeur and rank cheese. It fares better than the album’s blander fare (“Apocalypse 1993”, “Nostalgia”) and certainly isn’t the hammiest misstep (“Hour of the Wolf”), but the album’s highlights are the tracks that lean hardest into strong grooves (“Russian Doll”, “Little Boy”) or else take its kitsch so far that it becomes screwball fun (“Machine Guns and Peacock Feathers”).

It ain’t enough. Almost all great pop performances transcend suspension of belief and cement their own emotional truths, or craftily tip their hat to the plastic elements of their construction: Ulver’s pompous demeanour crumbles against the latter task, and Garm’s affected delivery fails to elevate his leaden subject matter to the former (I lie and wait and stare into / The vampire at the door / A dark and endless night /Haunted by images, uh, sure). Some of the records on this list are approaching 30 years of age, and you’d better take my word that this here ’20s zombification of ’80s pop tropes bollocks is the one that’s aged like milk.

Tracks you need in your life: “Machine Guns and Peacock Feathers”

C

Hexahedron (2021)

On paper, the thought of a studio-mixed set of live tracks exploring reworked ideas from Flowers of Evil was not topping my list of things that would restore any faith that album had ceded – oh boy. How wrong I was. This right here is why you discog crawl bands like Ulver: Hexahedron is classy, slick and end-to-end solid on a level that none of their other live-studio experiments and few of their actual LPs come close to: you’ll find far less dead space than Drone Activity (despite the opener packing 15 straight minutes of just that), and less incohesive than ATGCLVLSSCAP. The tones here have prominent overlap with the band’s synthpop releases, but the band stretch them out into expansive progressive electronic territory instead of subjugating to mediocre pop showmanship – Garm gets only one mic flex here, which he deploys to great effect on the swaggering “A Fateful Symmetry”, a much appreciated upscaling of the sinister groove on Flowers of Evil‘s “Little Boy”. 

“Aeon Blue” goes one further and refurbished the “One Last Dance” chords into whatever you call the downtempo equivalent of a magnum opus (this track would very likely crack my Ulver top 10 at this point), while “Bounty Hunter” kicks off with a Fuck Buttons-esque suite of tremolo filters, whining feedback and growling bass, reinforcing that while these pieces phase in and out of one another seamlessly, they also carry an attractive level of diversity. Nothing in Ulver’s discography caters as evenly to background or active listening as this record – the layering and tones here pack frankly luxuriant levels of depth and invite close inspection, but the record’s sauntering pace will carry anyone who leans into it. This record is a real growth statement – it feels like a very natural culmination of the last few years of synthpop-era Ulver despite (maybe precisely because of) its lack of pop, as well as a vindication of the live/studio hybrids they’ve been toying with for about as long. It’s too slick and palatable to *need* to be a statement piece, but more than up to the task for those of us who needed one after Flowers of Evil: my paws are crossed that they’ll keep it up from here. 

Tracks you need in your life: “Aeon Blue”, “Bounty Hunter”, “A Fearful Symmetry”

A–