August 2026 AOTM: Perdition City by Ulver

Album of the Month: Perdition City - Ulver

If you're familiar with the genre, Trip Hop usually brings to mind the classic '90s bands from Britain that pioneered the genre, Portishead and Massive Attack most prominently. If you aren't familiar, it's a genre that came up during the boom of experimental and electronic music from the UK in the 1990s, alongside the likes of drum & bass and the Hauntology movement. Trip Hop originated from disaffected youths in London and Bristol mixing American jazz and R&B with Jamaican dub and the sound of their contemporary rock and electronic underworld, so it's a bit shocking that one of the genres greatest tour-de-force records come from a veteran Norwegian black metal band.

Ulver spent the '90s broadening the horizons of the 2nd Wave of Black Metal in Norway by incorporating prominent folk elements and atmospheric field recordings. By the time they made the jump to electronic and experimental music, their 1995 debut Bergtatt was critically revered as among the best that black metal had to offer. But if you look at anything Ulver have released since this record, Perdition City, released in 2000, it will follow in its footsteps as the band branched out within the electronic music space.

This all makes Perdition City perhaps the biggest left-field homerun I've come across in music. A band so successful at one kind of music completely abandoning their sound for something a whole universe away stylistically. It is a miracle that Perdition City succeeds at what it does. The record creates a bleak and paranoid atmosphere, evoking images of endless concrete brutalism soaked in rain, a cyber-punk future through the interiority of David Fincher or the experimentalism of David Lynch-- fitting for the "Music to an Interior Film" subtitle.

Much of the first half of the record is a dominated by a delicate balance between dramatic piano and deliciously analog sounding drum machine beats, led by synthesized melodies and Chris Rygg's light, crooning vocals. Check out "Porn Piece", drawing out a reserved intro with clean guitar and synthesized double bass, using sharp electronic leads to speak, almost plead, with the listener. All this before the song opens wide when Rygg's vocals come in, first subdued then anthemic, crying out nostalgia for a cold yesterday in the light of a far emptier tomorrow.

Booklet art from the album

It's those moments that the album lives for, when the dramatic, soundtrack-like instrumentation can build into something kinetic and worthy of the fore-front. This doesn't always come in the form of vocals either: the massive bass riff of "Hallways of Always" totally redefines the tracks' dark ambient sound, complementing the heavy handed piano and deeply resonant kick drum.

"The Future Sound of Music" references the legendary Techno group The Future Sound of London, and pays homage through its brighter electronics. I especially love the hint of hope the call and response synths in the intro bring to the albums' immense sense of space and scale, like communication devices conquering a place of intimidating scale and frightening inhospitality-- a danger which seems to reaffirm itself through a biblically immense buzzing that almost overwhelms the whole track in thunderous noise.

The album does definitely let itself dawdle too much within the industrial, dark ambient soundscapes of the tracks following "The Future Sound of Music". "Dead City Centers" brings back some of the jazz found on the excellent opener "Lost in Moments", but doesn't mix it nearly as well within its spooky ambiance as the opener does. And the Psycho theme remix on "Catalept" comes across a bit half-baked, and ill-suited to the album's futuristic aesthetic and sense of loneliness.

Thankfully the album ends on a stronger note with the vocally led "Nowhere/Catastrophe", the least tonally dark track on the record which plays like a perfect synthesis of the album's best components: emotive guitar and piano instrumentation, hushed and suave vocals, and consuming synth pads which wash over the biggest moments on the track.

Ulver would go on to continue experimenting, but from what I've heard I don't think they ever topped their first foray into electronic music. This record uses its impersonal aesthetic to simulate a highly intimate experience within such a setting.

-Paul Taylor

(Web Content Director at WXOU)