Review Summary: A pleasant if unambitious release from the Norwegian shapeshifters.
Ulver’s career is one of the eclectic genre journeys in modern music. Their last run of albums leaned heavily into synths, pop sensibilities, and more traditional songwriting structures, while still being very artsy fartsy and experimental — which worked for a while, though by the time
Liminal Animals came out, that sound was starting to feel a little stale.
Neverland represents another pivot in Ulver’s catalog.
With this being Ulver’s 14th album, they’ve swung back toward their more electronic, atmospheric side. Think ambient soundscapes, IDM-tinged rhythms, trance-like textures and effects, and a much looser, less structured approach. With the exception of some vocal samples on the opener, this is an entirely instrumental album too. The group described wanting to create a sense of mysticism and the feeling of traveling into undiscovered lands, but without relying on the pop-structured songwriting of their recent releases. However, while the pivot was needed, I’m not so sold on the execution.
This overall sound of the album is lush and calm, and steeped in that new age chill-out vibe, but often it’s calm to the point of being sleepy and nondescript. There’s some trance and IDM influence here — but instead of going full deep house or full glitch, Ulver applies these ideas with an almost post-rock mindset and organic instrumentation. Which results in an album of many disconnected tracks that feel like singular pieces rather than an immersive start to finish record that you can get lost in. It’s more about creating a
vibe than creating a
journey.
Most of the tracks are pretty straight-forword chill out tracks, that are perfectly pleasant, but blur together quickly. For example -
’People Of The Hills’ and
'Fire In The End’ are nice, easy, almost cosy feeling tracks which in isolation are solid, but in an album like this kind of fail to really stand out. The album does come to life a bit in the middle.
'They're Coming! The Birds!' has some good pulse, some tension and actually tries to go somewhere. Along with
'Welcome To The Jungle' it has a bit more going on instrumentally.
'Hark! Hark! The Dogs Do Bark' and
'Pandora’s Box' both bring a vague trip-hop flavour, with very faint Massive Attack or Portishead vibes - some smoky drums and shadowy atmosphere, honestly I wish the album has more of this direction and leaned in harder to the trip-hop stuff because there’s some potential here.
‘Horses Of The Plough' has some eerie sounds, but the persistent new age flutes which permeate through it just soften any edge so much that it never feels tense or unsettling - more like spooky themed spa music
One of the biggest problems is that a lot of these tracks are simply too short to explore the ideas they introduce. They hint at some trance, IDM or Trip-Hop but never fully commit enough to feel really immersive.
I don’t want to be too harsh or critical here because you have to respect Ulver as a band. Most artists pick a lane and spend their entire career in that lane refining and adapting incrementally. Ulver? They swerve across genres lane like true shapeshifters. But that shapeshifting comes with risks — and this feels like a project where they didn’t push themselves far enough to make the experiment truly rewarding.
So in the end,
Neverland is a perfectly pleasant if unremarkable new-age chill-out album that feels more like background ambience than a fully realised journey.
