Black metal has been chummy with ambient music since birth, but Ulver’s commitment to the genre is something else. Their debut album, Bergtatt (1995), released when singer Kristoffer Garm Rygg was 18, inspired a whole universe of nature-drunk folk metal; meanwhile, Nattens Madrigal (1997) is a prime example of the most scabrous and distortion-encrusted recesses of black metal. Between the two was the ambient Kveldssanger (1996), which proved they could work well at a lower altitude, but that still didn’t prepare anyone for 2000’s Perdition City: an airless, bled-out trip-hop expanse, finely manicured but devoid of people, and a plausible precursor to the current wave of hyperreal Scandinavian art-pop.
Neverland comes 25 years into their post-Perdition City journey, and though it’s a fine example of their late-career style, two absences are obvious. The first is Garm’s vocals, which can be a fly in the ointment; even at his best, he sometimes sounds like Mark Kozelek adrift in a sea of Dubai dream tones. The lengthiest stretch of language here is the introductory “Fear in a Handful of Dust,” whose recital from T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” hearkens back to their earlier experiments setting William Blake’s poetry, and which probably sounds more badass if you didn’t study the poem in high school English.
The other major absence is Tore Ylwizaker, Ulver’s keyboardist, who passed away in 2024. Ylwizaker’s contributions to the band were a major factor in their move away from metal into electronic music; without his characteristically chilly midrange piano textures, the band—now the duo of Garm and multi-instrumentalist Jørn H. Sværen—searches for extremes of bass and treble, digging into the low end while keyboards and fake orchestras trill endlessly in a higher register. The production sounds more EDM circa 2011 than ambient techno circa 2001, and “Hark! Hark! The Dogs Do Bark” is interspersed with a sound that could be a dubstep wub, someone imitating a dog, or the two mixed together.
If the cover art suggests ’70s private-press albums have snuck into Garm’s rotation, the music seems to confirm it. Lead single “The Weeping Stone” sounds like Hans Zimmer remixing Iasos’ new-age classic Inter-Dimensional Music, with a floor-rumbling low end undergirding avian and simian chatter. A high-pitched whine on a few tracks could be an aquatic animal. Ulver don’t totally escape the worst tendencies of new age: “Welcome to the Jungle” and its fake sitars represent the kind of out-of-touch exotica the post-I Am the Center new age revival was supposed to supplant. But it’s fun to see a band who created an irreplaceable atmosphere on its debut commit so completely to a form of vibe music that’s as balmy and diurnal as Bergtatt was cold and grim. It’s hard to find any real analogs for Ulver; imagine if Tomb Mold committed to their jazzy side gig Daydream Plus for the next quarter-century, or if Neil Young hung up his guitar and kept putting out variations on Trans.
Still, Neverland doesn’t quite break the pervasive feeling that the band’s trajectory since Nattens madrigal hasn’t always lined up with their strengths. Bits of their metal roots shine through in apocalyptic details like the Eliot narration and apocalyptically absurd titles like “They’re Coming! The Birds!” and “Hark! Hark! The Dogs Do Bark,” not to mention the fact that one of the tracks shares a name with an all-time sleaze anthem from Guns N’ Roses. Yet their early work still feels somehow more atmospheric than their later work where atmosphere is the focus, with a real sense of fear that Neverland can’t quite conjure for all its handfuls of dust. Ulver is a role model for any musical act, metal or otherwise, that refuses to be boxed in and takes big swings for art’s sake. But while Neverland is a triumph of unbending commitment, it’s less often a triumph of inspiration.
