Ulver's Liminal Animals is a boundary-pushing album that blends the band's rich history with urgent, present-day reflections on chaos, uncertainty, and loss.
Ulver's new album, Liminal Animals, marks a significant chapter in the band's storied history. Released after a turbulent year, their thirteenth studio effort takes listeners on a journey through the chaos of the present moment, anchored in the band's signature evolution of sound.
The album’s story began a year ago when Ulver dropped tracks like spectral whispers, one by one, offering only fragments of the larger narrative they were building. "Quite liberating in these twilight years," they said, embracing the freedom to create without the constraints of a strict concept. But as the pieces of Liminal Animals fell into place, they formed a world of their own. A world filled with creatures, ghosts, spiders, gods, sheep, and an overarching sense of unease. The album cover, a drawing by Austin Osman Spare, echoes these sentiments, featuring a self-portrait titled The Senseless Seven.
In many ways, the album is a continuation of the themes explored on 2017's The Assassination of Julius Caesar and their 2020 release, Flowers of Evil. But this time, the band's reflections on confusion and conflict are more pronounced, as if the weight of the current moment is pressing harder into their music. The album speaks to a world filled with uncertainty, where disaster looms large and the questions seem endless.
Liminal Animals feels like a record made by a band standing on the edge, on the threshold of something both exciting and unsettling. The release of it is bittersweet, marked by the absence of Tore Ylvisaker, a core member since 1997. His passing in August 2024 cast a shadow over the album's final stages, leaving the band to grapple with his absence. Liminal Animals is dedicated to him, a tribute to a musical brother who had been with them for the better part of 27 years. His absence is felt deeply throughout the album, forever haunting its tracks.