The oars striking the water; the war horns; the feeling of bone chilling cold before a note has been struck. These sounds and sensations can mean only one thing – It must be time for a new slab of progressive Viking metal from Enslaved!

Sixteen albums in (I know it’s more if you include all the other stuff they’ve released, but humour me, please) it absolutely beggars belief that a band so long in the tooth can sound so consistently fresh and vibrant as Enslaved does on Heimdal. Opening track Behind The Mirror, an ice-cold shard of blackened progressive-cum-psych-metal, covers more ground than Levison Wood with a bad case of St Vitus’ dance, and it’s this constantly morphing nature that keeps Heimdal front and centre of the listener’s concentration for the duration. The tracks Congelia and Heimdal both weigh in at a hefty eight minutes plus in duration, yet both fly by in a flurry of challenging twists and turns that never fail to work on the simple level of entertainment, whilst simultaneously offering so much more to the listener prepared to dig in immerse themselves in the experience.

The superb Forest Dweller is more straightforward – though absolutely no less effective – and the Zeppelinesque stridency at the opening of the song is an absolutely masterful piece of imaginative songcraft. Unsurprisingly that doesn’t last long as the song develops into a many-tentacled piece of prog that ebbs and flows on the back of a superb drum performance from Iver Sandøy and titanic (and very seventies-inspired) keyboard interjections from Håkon Vinje, who adds superb textures and embellishments throughout.

Kingdom takes the what appear to be the prog tropes of Gabriel-era Genesis and twists and contorts them into something genuinely unsettling; Ivar Bjørnson and Arve Isdal mesh superbly here, indulging in some serious chug, over which Grutle Kjellson deploys a bewildering range of vocal styles and moods. It’s a genuinely enthralling listening experience from start to finish.

But it’s perhaps the final triumvirate of songs, The Eternal Sea, Caravans To The Outer Worlds and Heimdal, that see the band effortlessly moving into overdrive; here they give the perfect exposition of progressive metal, harvesting from a plethora of sources from the last fifty years of music and synthesising the result into something that’s frankly breathtaking. The guitar playing in the first half of Caravans… is simply sublime, but for much of the twenty-odd minutes that these three occupy is simply too good for mere words to convey. Heimdal is a great album, pure and simple, it’s true, yet at the same time it absolutely demands immersion for best results. Do yourself a favour – allocate yourself some ‘you time’ and get stuck into it’s delights as soon as you can.

Heimdal releases on March 3rd.