SABATON have not begun album twelve, but Joakim Brodén is already collecting parts for it.
Speaking to Jason Saulnier while the band prepare to take "Legends" across North America, the frontman described a writing cycle that never quite switches off and never quite switches on either. "We're always working on music, but it's not until we hit songwriting mode where we go all in," he said. "Everybody in the band writes music. I'm the main songwriter, and it never really stops, so I'm always playing around with music because it's fun."
What does stop is the part right after a record. "I usually take a break for six months or so after we've recorded an album, because being part of the pre-production and songwriting and then all of the recording and the mixing, I'm pretty blown out by music at that point." After that the ideas return, but he does not force them into shape. "I'll write half of a song, and if I hit a wall, I'll just say, 'Okay, leave that for later.' It's fun to gather all ideas and inspiration, and then I start working with whatever I got when it's time to make a new album."
The obstacle is not the music. It is the subject. SABATON build albums around a theme, and this time nobody has landed on one. "We're still touring on 'Legends', but, yeah, I have some fun ideas. But we don't actually know what we're gonna do with the next album, theme-wise, because we usually have a theme with our albums. We're still trying to figure that out. We have a bunch of ideas, obviously, but which one we're going with, I have no idea now."
Twenty-one years on from "Primo Victoria", Brodén is clear-eyed about what experience has and has not given him. "If I listen back to some of the first stuff from the first album, yeah, I wouldn't do it that way today. In the beginning, you might have the ideas but not the experience to make it into a song. These days the trouble is more getting that unique cool idea. If you have that great idea, it's really easy, with twenty years-plus of experience, to make that into a SABATON song."
He also knows exactly how far that improvement travels with a listener, and it is not very far. "We're not a revolutionary band, we're an evolutionary band, so there might not be too much difference between album four and five, but if you listen to album two and eight, there's been some evolution going on." Then the honest bit: "If you discover a band in your late teens, whichever era that was where you discovered that band, that's always gonna be your era of that band. And that's hard to compete with."
SABATON open the "Legends On Tour" North American run on September 23 in Halifax, Nova Scotia, closing December 12 in Fort Lauderdale. Europe follows in April 2027.