Compelled to forever uphold the astonishing, formidable standards that he set as the chief creative driving force in Emperor, Ihsahn has approached his solo career to date with laudable dignity and bravery, producing two startling and surprisingly diverse albums that have added a huge amount of layers and shades to the Norwegian’s established inventory of ideas while skilfully maintaining a close spiritual and physical connection to the epic black metal realm that he did so much to sustain and drag incrementally forward over the years. But even within that strident exploration of new territory, Ihsahn has played things comparatively straight and safe until now, preferring to evolve anew, at his own pace and within certain known musical boundaries. After, the endgame in a frequently audacious opening trilogy of solo albums, is the sound of shackles being flung from the battlements, as every last semblance of responsibility to honour black metal tradition is proudly and arrogantly jettisoned in favour of a truly progressive and acutely subversive reinvention and re-imagining of all that has gone before. Understandably, a lot has been made about the involvement of Jurgen Mønkeby, saxophonist with Norwegian jazz-metal freaks Shining and a prodigious talent in his own right. Used sparingly but shrewdly, Mønkeby’s saxophone adds a level of strangeness and melancholy to the album’s most powerful tracks – the deceptively serene title track, the furiously unhinged ‘A Grave Inversed’ and the thematically intertwined ‘Undercurrent’ and ‘On The Shores’ – that take the entire album somewhere thoroughly alien and thrilling; a journey that is very much in keeping with unifying lyrical themes of unfamiliar and hostile environments and abstract, dehumanising isolation. Elsewhere, however, there is an equal amount of invention and inspirational daring within the more familiar sonic textures of ‘The Barren Lands’, ‘Heaven’s Black Sea’, ‘Austere’ and the organ-drenched and gloriously psychedelic ‘Frozen Lakes On Mars’. Seemingly buoyed and emboldened by his ongoing association with Opeth, a burgeoning love of Radiohead and an ever-growing disinterest in the petulant demands of a black metal scene that has, in truth, never really come to grips with his idiosyncratic modus operandi, Ihsahn is making the very best music of his career right now. For all its wilfully low-key presentation and overall air of off-the-radar awkwardness, After is an album that deserves to be regarded as one of the finest, from any genre, to emerge in recent times. It’s demanding, dense and often thoroughly bewildering, but its uniqueness and otherworldly potency are something to be cherished and celebrated by anyone with a lust for the new, metallic or otherwise. This is 2010’s first utterly essential metal album and it’s hard to imagine anyone making a better one any time soon.