When vocalist Kristoffer Rygg co-founded Ulver in 1993, he was a teenager infatuated with the danger and rawness of Norwegian black metal. “When you’re 15, 16, 17, that stuff has quite the draw,” he told this writer in 2020, “even though I never ventured into the murder business or the arson business.”
Instead, Rygg ventured into the genre-busting business. A trilogy of metal and Nordic folk releases offered everything he had to say in those spaces. So, after working as a studio apprentice and meeting late production/keyboard whizz Tore Ylwizaker, the musician reinvented Ulver as a fearless force, unafraid of industrial, progressive, ambient and even pop textures. The band now have an eclectic catalogue of 13 albums, with number 14 currently being released one single at a time.
