Norwegian metal-turned-synth rock band Ulver has announced the title and release date for their upcoming 12th studio album. Flowers of Evil is set for release on August 28.
The band hinted back in October 2019 that they would be hitting the studio to work on a new album, which they said would be released some time in 2020. Fans got a first taste of the album’s sound in February when they released lead single “Russian Doll.” The band followed that up with a second single, “Little Boy,” in April.
Flowers of Evil is the follow-up to 2017 studio album The Assassination of Julius Caesar. The band released a live album, Drone Activity, in 2019.
Along with the new album, Ulver has announced that they will be putting out their long-awaited book chronicling their 27-year career. Wolves Evolve: The Ulver Story is also set for release on August 28.
The book has been about a decade in the making. Said the band in a statement:
“We’ve been talking about making a book – the Ulver story – for years. First for our 15th anniversary, then for our 20th anniversary, and now, after well over a quarter of a century, the time has come. We’ve been riding this beast for the greater part of our lives, and the future is not what it used to be.”
According to the statement, Wolves Evolve features 150 pages of interviews with Ulver’s members and journalists Phil Alexander, Nile Bowie and Torolf Kroglund, as well as photos from the band’s archives.
Said the band about how the book came together,
“The conversations began among the spring blossoms of two years ago, with the recollection of their first downtown Oslo rehearsal space, back in 1993, in the midst of a new home-grown scene – small, fertile and hell-bent on pushing boundaries. Wolves Evolve follows Ulver through the dark woods of their infancy and into the dead city centres where they would shift between their many shapes to come: apostates and phantoms, thieves and mourners, chameleons and dogs. They discuss their reclusive studio existence, and the enlarged pack’s venture out into the open air as a live band. Fittingly, the conversations ended this January, in their studio, just a few hundred metres from where it all began, 27 years earlier.”
“We go to the ruins to understand”, multi-instrumentalist Jørn H. Sværen is quoted as saying in the statement.
Concludes the statement,
“Wolves Evolve is indeed a labyrinthine tale of musical evolution on a grand scale. Some may be confused. Others will follow the band through their pantheon of friends and associates, obsessions and affinities. And while there, they will get a glimpse of the shapes and mis-shapes that have made up the alternative cultures of the past three decades, rescued from the iniquity of oblivion.”
Ulver played two shows in New York back in March 2019, which were the band’s first US performances ever. They had also booked a west coast trek for June of that year, though those shows ended up being cancelled due to low ticket sales. The band is slated to return to the US in August 2021 for the rescheduled Psycho Las Vegas festival.
More tour dates can be found on the band’s Facebook page.
Flowers of Evil is available for pre-order on CD and various colors of vinyl in the US and UK now. Wolves Evolve is only available for pre-order in the UK.
