In the spring of 2020, the world fell silent. For those of us who have built our lives around the communion of live music—the physical transference of energy between artist and audience—the silence was absolute. The industry’s pivot to the digital stream was immediate, but often disheartening. We were inundated with low-fidelity “living room concerts,” ephemeral gestures that, while well-intentioned, only underscored what had been lost.

But some artists refused to treat the moment as a stopgap. For the Norwegian progressive metal masters Enslaved, this sudden pause coincided with their 30th anniversary, a milestone that demanded reflection, not resignation. Their response was not a fleeting digital event, but a profound act of creation. As vocalist Grutle Kjellson later noted, if they were going to do something, they were “going to do it in a proper way.”

The result is ‘Cinematic Tour 2020,’ a collection announced for release on June 25, 2021, by By Norse Music and Nuclear Blast Records. This is not a conventional live album. It is a four-part curated history, a virtual museum captured on a 4xDVD (PAL V.2) set.

During that year of isolation, Enslaved partnered with four major European festivals—Verftet Online Festival, Roadburn, Beyond the Gates, and Summer Breeze—to create four distinct, high-production cinematic rituals. Each film explores a different facet of their identity: their own favorite hymns, a set chosen by their fans, a full performance of a canonical opus, and the virtual debut of their new work.

This release, therefore, is not a souvenir of a lost year; it is a definitive statement of artistic identity, forged in silence and broadcast as a signal.

A Monument to the Ethereal

In an age of digital impermanence, Enslaved has made a deliberate choice to create an artifact. The ‘Cinematic Tour 2020’ is not just a file to be streamed; it is a physical object designed to last, a statement on the value of music as tangible art. The standard 4xDVD set is a limited first pressing of 1,000 copies, presented in a “matt finish and gold foil Slipcase” with a 16-page booklet.

Beyond this, the band announced a Collectors Wooden Boxset, limited to 300 copies, described as “handcrafted, personally named, and numbered.” Guitarist Ivar Bjørnson, calling himself and his bandmates “old vinyl collectors,” referred to this edition as the “crown jewel.” This is not marketing hyperbole. It is a critical insight into the band’s ethos.

By encasing these digital performances—born of the ether—in handcrafted wood and gold foil, Enslaved is rejecting the disposable nature of the “living room stream.” They are making the temporary permanent, elevating these four performances to the same canonical status as a studio album.

The Four Faces of the Fane

The set is structured as a journey through a four-chambered fane, each room dedicated to a different aspect of the band’s soul. The first, ‘The Rise of Ymir,’ captures their performance for the Verftet Online Festival, a setlist chosen by the band as a “powerful gathering of some of Enslaved’s all-times favourite hymns.”

The second, ‘Chronicles of the Northbound,’ held in collaboration with the legendary Roadburn Festival, is a dialogue with their community—a “dream set” assembled “1:1 from an online voting by fans.” The third, ‘Utgard – The Journey Within,’ is the “virtual release party” for their latest studio album, ‘Utgard,’ presenting the band’s present and future.

But the philosophical and historical anchor of the entire collection, the one that informs all others, is the fourth: ‘Below the Lights.’

The Great Schism Revisited: ‘Below the Lights’

To comprehend modern Enslaved, one must comprehend the year 2003. The band, having emerged from the Norwegian black metal scene of the early 1990s with seminal works like ‘Vikingligr Veldi’ and ‘Frost,’ had begun to experiment. This led to 2001’s ‘Monumension,’ a record that, while ambitious, “fell flat in several ways.” It was, by all accounts, a “sink or swim moment.”

Their seventh album, ‘Below the Lights,’ was the “path forward.” It was the album where they truly “defined progressive black metal,” seamlessly fusing their harsh, “Viking” past with the atmospheric, psychedelic rock influences—the “Floydisms” —they had long admired. It was the great schism, the moment of synthesis from which the next two decades of their career would flow.

The ‘Cinematic Tour 2020’ performance of this “acclaimed opus,” recorded in league with the Beyond the Gates Festival at USF Verftet in Bergen, is a profound act of canonization. It is Enslaved, at 30, acknowledging this album as their foundational text. This is made explicit by the inclusion of guest musician Inge Rypdal, who performed on the original recording of ‘A Darker Place’ and returned in 2020 to perform on this cinematic version. This performance is a bridge across 17 years.

The DVD captures the album’s full narrative arc, presented in its entirety. It begins with the atmospheric build of ‘As Fire Swept Clean the Earth,’ moving through the dark, melodic passages of ‘The Dead Stare’ and the iconic ‘The Crossing.’ It explores the Mid-Eastern motives of ‘Queen of Night,’ the epic scope of ‘Havenless,’ the raw aggression of ‘Ridicule Swarm,’ and culminates in the album’s defining thesis, ‘A Darker Place.’

Through ‘The Crossing’

As a preview of the box set, the band released a video of ‘The Crossing,’ which serves as a perfect microcosm of the project’s entire aesthetic. The performance, recorded “on a dark day in summer 2020,” at USF Verftet in Bergen, Norway, was not filmed with static cameras in a club. It was a full-fledged film production, credited to the Bergen-based m12 Kultur, a production house whose team includes producer Sigve Sælensminde.

The stated goal was to capture an “otherworldly performance” through a “new modern lens.” The visual result is polished, controlled, and deeply atmospheric, using shadow and light as instruments. The audio, crucially, is not a raw replication of the 2003 original. The original track was noted for its sudden, Opeth-like shift from a “long quiet melodic acoustic intro” to searing aggression. This new version, with its “excellent, airy and live” mix, is the sound of the modern, three-vocalist lineup re-interpreting the past. It is the sound of synthesis, not nostalgia.

The Journey to the Outer Place: ‘Utgard’

If ‘Below the Lights’ is the set’s historical anchor, ‘Utgard – The Journey Within’ is its intellectual and philosophical core. This performance, acting as the “virtual release party” for their new album in partnership with Summer Breeze Open Air, is a guide to the band’s modern mind. The setlist featured key album tracks, including ‘Jettegryta,’ ‘Homebound,’ and ‘Urjotun,’ which serve as signposts on a conceptual journey.

Ivar Bjørnson has described ‘Utgard’ as a “full-blown concept” album. It is not, he explains, about Asgard and the gods we know, but about “Utgard,” the “outer place,” the mythological realm of the giants. Most importantly, Bjørnson and Kjellson explicitly link this Norse concept to the “psychological realm,” specifically “Carl Jung’s writings about Utgard representing the shadow side of the self.”

This is not a casual reference. It is the central pillar of the band’s work. They are using Norse cosmology as a framework for psychological integration, a “landscape of human inner life.” This aligns directly with Jung’s theory of the “shadow,” the unconscious and often “disagreeable” parts of the personality that must be confronted and integrated to become whole. This is the “hero’s journey” articulated by writers like Joseph Campbell, applied not to a single myth, but to a 30-year career.

The genius of the ‘Cinematic Tour 2020’ is that it packages ‘Below the Lights’—the 2003 act of unconsciously integrating their progressive “shadow” self—with ‘Utgard,’ the 2020 conscious articulation of that very journey.

A Dialogue with the Northbound

The remaining two films reveal the symbiotic relationship between Enslaved and their community. ‘Chronicles of the Northbound,’ the fan-voted set from Roadburn, is a mandate from their listeners. The setlist is a perfect synthesis of their career, placing 1994’s ‘Fenris’ and 1997’s ‘793 (Slaget om Lindisfarne)’ alongside modern progressive anthems like ‘Roots of the Mountain’ and ‘The Watcher.’ The fans, given the choice, did not vote for a retreat to the past. They voted for the entire journey.

The band’s own curated set, ‘The Rise of Ymir,’ reinforces this. While it includes epics like ‘Ethica Odini,’ ‘Ruun,’ and ‘Sacred Horse,’ nearly half of the setlist is drawn directly from ‘Below the Lights,’ featuring ‘The Dead Stare,’ ‘The Crossing,’ and ‘Havenless.’ The band, the fans, and the historians all arrive at the same conclusion: 2003 was the moment the future began.

The Crafters of the New Ritual

This entire, ambitious project was only possible because of the band’s modern lineup. The departure of long-time members prior to ‘Utgard’ could have been a crisis; instead, it became an evolution. The “new blood” of keyboardist/vocalist Håkon Vinje and drummer/vocalist Iver Sandøy gave the band renewed vitality and a new configuration of three distinct vocalists.

Most strategically, Iver Sandøy is not just the drummer; he is the band’s in-house sound producer. This “vertical integration” is the secret to how they did this “in a proper way.” The audio for these cinematic events was handled by the man performing the music. This allowed for total quality control, which, when combined with the visual talent of local Bergen film crews like m12 Kultur, resulted in a world-class production executed entirely during a global lockdown.

The Past as Prologue

The ‘Cinematic Tour 2020’ is not a conclusion. It is not an epitaph for a 30-year career. It is a blueprint. It demonstrates a new methodology for how Enslaved will curate and present their own legacy. The proof is in their future-facing announcements.

In 2026, the band is booked to headline Fire in the Mountains , an esoteric festival whose ethos is rooted in nature, community, and spiritual reverence. In that same season, they will appear at the Hell’s Heroes festival. Their performance is not a standard “greatest hits” set. They are scheduled to perform their 1994 debut album, ‘Vikingligr Veldi,’ in its entirety.

The pattern is unmistakable. Enslaved is in the midst of a multi-year, systematic, and deeply intellectual retrospective of their entire career. The ‘Cinematic Tour 2020’ was the proof of concept. Having canonized their 2003 progressive opus and their 2020 philosophical statement, they are now reaching back to canonize their 1994 origin.

This 4xDVD set is the definitive document of a band that has achieved total mastery of its own history, proving that the 30-year journey from the raw “outer place” to the psychological “inner place” was, in fact, the same journey all along.

Enslaved’s four-part cinematic document presents a band in total dialogue with its past. When you reflect on their thirty-year journey, from the raw fjords of ‘Vikingligr Veldi’ to the psychological depths of ‘Utgard,’ which era do you find most potent, and how does this ‘Cinematic Tour’ collection alter your perception of their complete body of work?