History Music / Ulver

* NotChristianRock: A few potential cases:
** ''The Blake Album'' uses a (very unconventional, given his leanings towards UsefulNotes/{{Gnosticism}}) religious text from Creator/WilliamBlake as the source of its lyrics.
** ''Messe I.X-VI.X'' uses religious imagery throughout (for instance, "Noche oscuro del alma" is named after a religious poem by the Spanish mystic St. John of the Cross), but is apparently structured as sort of "peace mass" for Lebanon.
** "Ecclesiastes (A Vernal Catnap)" uses the Literature/BookOfEcclesiastes as the source of most of its lyrics.

* RippedFromTheHeadlines: The song title "As Syrians Pour In, Lebanon Grapples with Ghosts of a Bloody Past", which takes this trope UpToEleven - it's an ''actual headline'', used verbatim.

* 1997 - ''Nattens madrigal - Aatte hymne til ulven i manden''[[note]]lit: Madrigals of the Night - 8 hymns to the wolf in man[[/note]] (Raw BlackMetal)

* 1994 - ''Bergtatt - Et eeventyr i 5 capitler'' (BlackMetal, FolkMetal)
* 1995 - ''Kveldssanger'' (Neofolk)
* 1997 - ''Nattens madrigal - Aatte hymne til ulven i manden'' (Raw BlackMetal)

* ContemptibleCover: The cover of ''Childhood's End'' features "The Terror of War", Nick Ut's infamous "napalm girl" photograph from the Vietnam War of nine-year-old [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phan_Thi_Kim_Phuc Phan Thị Kim Phúc]] fleeing naked down a road after being burnt by napalm. Arguably a much more {{justified|Trope}} example than most; it's a World Press Photo of the Year and Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph, one of the most recognisable images of the Vietnam War, and a stark representation of the album's concept (explained directly above).[[note]]Kim Phúc's life story is rather remarkable: Ut took her and the other injured children in the photograph to a hospital after taking it, and she was so badly burnt that doctors at the time believed that she would not survive. However, a fourteen-month hospital stay involving seventeen surgical procedures ultimately enabled her survival, although she did not regain full movement in her body until ten years after the attack; she remains alive as of April 2019 and is a peace activist who has won several awards for her work. She and Ut also continue to speak "almost weekly via telephone", according to Wiki/ThatOtherWiki.[[/note]]

* MohsScaleOfRockAndMetalHardness: ''Anywhere'' from a 1 to an 11 or even beyond. Strangely, most of their 11 moments are from their remix album released after they abandoned metal; their heaviest metal album, ''Nattens madrigal'', is too melodic to qualify for an 11, despite the thoroughly abrasive production (it's a solid 10 all the way through, though). The remix album verges into HarshNoise territory at its heaviest (which should be no surprise since Music/{{Merzbow}} was one of the remixers).

* SongStyleShift: Perhaps most notably in "Rolling Stone". The first half is pretty straightforward (and [[EarWorm extremely catchy]]) SynthPop. The second half delves into [[AvantGardeMusic Avant-Garde]] ProgressiveRock, and it also employs a blast beat for most of its climax, which arguably makes it the closest Ulver have come to performing BlackMetal in over twenty years.

* QuestioningTitle: "Darling, Didn't We Kill You?"

* EpicRocking: Quite a few songs. Perhaps the best examples are "Silence Teaches You How to Sing" from the EP of the same name (the band's longest composition at just over twenty-four minutes in length), every song on its companion EP ''Silencing the Singing,'' "Ulvsblakk" from ''Kveldssanger,'' "Proverbs of Hell, Plates 7-10" and "A Memorable Fancy, Plates 17-20" from the Blake album, "Providence" and "Stone Angels" from ''Wars of the Roses,'' most of ''Bergtatt,'' and about half of ''Perdition City,'' ''Messe I.X-VI.X,'' and ''ATGCLVLSSCAP.'' ''Terrestrials'' consists of this too, although not so much the rocking part.

* 2002 - ''Silencing the Singing'' (Electronica, [[{{Ambient}} Dark Ambient]]; anthology of material released in 2001)

* {{Instrumentals}}: ''Messe I.X-VI.X'', ''Terrestrials'', and ''ATGCLVLSSCAP'' are mostly instrumental, as is about half of ''Perdition City''. ''Lyckantropen Themes'', ''Svidd neger'', ''Riverhead'', and their contributions to ''Uno'' also fit, being film soundtracks. They're not the band's only examples either.

* {{Instrumentals}}: ''Messe I.X-VI.X'', ''Terrestrials'', and ''ATGCLVLSSCAP'' are mostly instrumental. ''Lyckantropen Themes'', ''Svidd neger'', and their contributions to ''Uno'' also fit, being film soundtracks. They're not the band's only examples either.

* ContemptibleCover: The cover of ''Childhood's End'' features "The Terror of War", Nick Ut's infamous "napalm girl" photograph from the Vietnam War of nine-year-old [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phan_Thi_Kim_Phuc Phan Thị Kim Phúc]] fleeing naked down a road after being burnt by napalm. Arguably a much more {{justified|Trope}} example than most; it's a World Press Photo of the Year and Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph, one of the most recognisable images of the Vietnam War, and as a stark representation of the album's concept, explained directly above. (Kim Phúc's life story is rather remarkable: Ut took her and the other injured children in the photograph to a hospital after taking it, and she was so badly burnt that doctors at the time believed that she would not survive. However, a fourteen-month hospital stay involving seventeen surgical procedures ultimately enabled her survival, although she did not regain full movement in her body until ten years after the attack; she remains alive as of April 2019 and is a peace activist who has won several awards for her work. She and Ut also continue to speak "almost weekly via telephone", according to Wiki/ThatOtherWiki.)

* ContemptibleCover: The cover of ''Childhood's End'' features "The Terror of War", Nick Ut's infamous "napalm girl" photograph from the Vietnam War of nine-year-old [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phan_Thi_Kim_Phuc Phan Thị Kim Phúc]] fleeing naked down a road after being burnt by napalm. Arguably a much more {{justified|Trope}} example than most; it's a World Press Photo of the Year and Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph that serves as a stark representation of the album's concept, explained directly above.

* ContemptibleCover: The cover of ''Childhood's End'' features "The Terror of War", Nick Ut's infamous "napalm girl" photograph from the Vietnam War of 12-year-old [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phan_Thi_Kim_Phuc Phan Thị Kim Phúc]] fleeing naked down a road after being burnt by napalm. Arguably a much more {{justified|Trope}} example than most; it's a World Press Photo of the Year and Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph that serves as a stark representation of the album's concept, explained directly above.

* ContemptibleCover: The cover of ''Childhood's End'' features the infamous "napalm girl" photograph from the Vietnam War, of 12 year old [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phan_Thi_Kim_Phuc Phan Thị Kim Phúc]] fleeing naked down a road after being burnt by napalm. Arguably a much more {{justified|Trope}} example than most; it's a Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph that serves as a stark representation of the album's concept, explained directly above.

* ContemptibleCover: The cover of ''Childhood's End'' features the infamous "napalm girl" photograph from the Vietnam War, of 12 year old [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phan_Thi_Kim_Phuc Phan Thị Kim Phúc]] fleeing naked down a road after being burnt by napalm. Arguably a {{justified|Trope}} example; it's a Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph that ties in directly with the album's concept, explained directly above.

* ContemptibleCover: The cover of ''Childhood's End'' features the infamous "napalm girl" photograph from the Vietnam War, of 12 year old Phan Thi Kim Phuc fleeing naked down a road after being burnt by napalm.

* SurprisinglyGentleSong: "I troldskog faren vild" and "Een stemme locker" from ''Bergtatt'' and "Trollskogen" from ''Vargnatt''. The latter two are {{folk}} songs without any electric instruments and the former contains only clean singing. After this point Ulver would vary their style too much for any of these changes to be considered surprising, although ''Terrestrials'' may be considered an example due to Music/SunnO's metal background and the absence of anything resembling metal on the album.

** Latin: "Somnam", meaning "dream"; "Funebre", meaning "funereal"; "Angelus novus", meaning "New Angel".

* GratuitousLatin: ''Sic transit gloria mundi'', a companion EP to ''The Assassination of Julius Caesar'', bears as its title a Latin phrase meaning ''Thus Passes the Glory of the World''.

* AltumVidetur: ''Sic transit gloria mundi'', a companion EP to ''The Assassination of Julius Caesar'', bears as its title a Latin phrase meaning ''Thus Passes the Glory of the World''.

** Greek: "Gnosis" ("Γνώσης"), meaning "knowledge"; "Catalept" ("Κατάλεπτ"), meaning "falling"; "Eos" ("Έως"), meaning "until". Also, "Ecclesiastes (A Vernal Catnap)" refers to a book of the Bible/Tanakh, but according to ThatOtherWiki, in Greek the word ("Ἐκκλησιαστής") means roughly "one who convenes or addresses an assembly". Finally, "Cromagnosis" looks like a word of Greek origin (in the Greek alphabet it could be written as either "Κρομαγνωσης" or "Χρομαγνωσης"), but there don't appear to be any cases of it being used as a single word in Greek script; it may be a pun invented by the band, and it appears to be intended to mean something like "Colour of Knowledge" or "Cry of Knowledge", depending upon which spelling was intended ("χρώμα" matches with "colour"). The band may also have intended a pun on the [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cro-Magnon Cro-Magnons]], the earliest known humans.

* LyricalDissonance: "Nemoralia" is a beautiful synth pop album that's primarily about an ancient Roman festival, but also includes lyrics of Nero burning Christians alive sung in the same blissful tone as the rest of the song.