AMON AMARTH release their twelfth album, The Allfather Awakens, on October 2 via Metal Blade Records. In a new interview with Steve Harkins of TalkShopLive, vocalist Johan Hegg and bassist Ted Lundström walked through how it came together — and the short version is that almost nothing went wrong.
Oden, the Norse all-father and god of war, wisdom, death, magic and poetry, is once again the through-line in the band's lyrics and artwork. Hegg is careful about the label, though. "It's a themed album, I would say, where most of the songs, not all of the songs, they are in one way or another connected to the Norse god Oden," he said. "And it's dipped into a lot of the mythological aspects of Oden from Norse mythology, but also some historical motifs as well, when it comes to Viking history and the Vikings' relations to that god." Not a concept record, in other words — a collection of historically grounded tales of conflict and sacrifice.
Hegg traced his own fascination back to a wall. "I was interested in Vikings from when I was very young. And I think it started in a really silly way, because I was interested in history in general. Obviously I knew about Vikings, but I didn't get interested in them until my sister actually wrote with pencil runes on her wall. And I was amazed. I was maybe, like, nine or 10, and I was amazed that we had this written language in Sweden from a thousand years ago." A Danish comic series, Valhalla, did the rest.
Lundström's version is more strategic. "When we started the band, when we began working on music in '92, we were just looking for our own little genre, to stand out from all the other bands in Stockholm and Sweden at the time. So we kind of put our interest from the Viking mythology into the band, which worked really good for us. There were a couple of bands before us that wrote about Vikings, but it was not too many."
The record is their first with Danish producer Jacob Hansen, and both men describe an unusually frictionless session. The band dropped in on him during a European day off to talk through what they wanted. "It was very smooth sailing, the whole recording session," Lundström said. Asked whether he had ever wanted to get Hansen in a headlock, Hegg laughed it off: "No, no, definitely not. I think maybe the other way around, because I kept wanting to do other new takes and different versions of what I already did."
The writing happened on the road, out of necessity — the last touring cycle ran far longer than planned. Guitarists Olavi Mikkonen and Johan Söderberg were riffing on tour buses and in warm-up rooms kitted out with digital drums and small amps. "We haven't had a proper rehearsal room for over a decade," Hegg noted. By the time the dates ended, several songs were already in the backpack.