ENSLAVED have won the Spellemannprisen — Norway's Grammy equivalent — in the Metal category for the live performance album "Heimdal — Live from Bergen Kino," recorded during their hometown performance at Bergen Kino in October 2024. The award was presented at the annual Spellemannprisen ceremony in Oslo on March 9, with vocalist and bassist Grutle Kjellson and keyboardist/vocalist Ivar Bjørnson accepting on behalf of the Bergen progressive black metal institution.
The win is particularly significant as it marks ENSLAVED's sixth Spellemannprisen award — the most of any Norwegian metal act — and their first for a live recording. Grutle Kjellson's acceptance speech, delivered partly in Bergen dialect to the amusement of the audience, addressed the paradox of a black metal band — a genre that emerged from an explicitly anti-establishment and often violently provocative context in the early 1990s — becoming the most decorated act in the country's most establishment music awards. "We started this because we wanted to destroy everything that music institutions represented," Kjellson said with evident irony. "And now look at us."
The live recording in question, "Heimdal — Live from Bergen Kino," was released in January 2026 and documents a two-night sold-out run in Bergen where ENSLAVED performed their 2023 album "Heimdal" in its entirety alongside a second set of fan-voted catalog classics. The performance has been praised by reviewers for the extraordinary quality of the live audio production and the band's ability to faithfully reproduce the complex arrangements of "Heimdal" in a live setting. The Spellemannprisen win ensures that the recording will receive a new wave of attention.