Swedish Metal Giants Sabaton Lead a Full-Scale Assault on Australia

This September history will be made with the return of Swedish metallers SABATON to Australian shores, joined nationally by special guests and fellow compatriots AMARANTHE. Bringing their trademark heavy metal maximalism down under later this year, SABATON’s Aussie headline run will kick off on Monday 1 September in Perth, before journeying to Adelaide, Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane, and concluding proceedings on Tuesday 9 September in Auckland. AMARANTHE will not be performing in Auckland.

For over twenty five years SABATON have cultivated a formidable reputation, headlining major festivals, snaring significant chart success, ticking off sold out arena concerts across the globe, and amassing a legion of fans worldwide via their surging riffs, commanding vocals, and songs detailing real-life wars and historic battles. Widely regarded as one of the hardest-working bands in the business and a major fixture in the European metal scene, SABATON have released 10 studio albums to date, with eight LPs landing Top 10 international chart status, six claiming Top 5, and some certified Gold (2010’s Coat of Arms, 2014’s Heroes, 2016’s The Last Stand, 2019’s The Great War) and Quadruple Platinum (2012’s Carolus Rex) in their motherland.

Along with their ongoing triumphs over the years, SABATON are equally a force to be reckoned with in a live setting, with their infamous performances often including elaborate props and effects to thrust your mind, body and spirit into the immersive storytelling and compelling stage presence on display. From detailing events of World War I and other historical conflicts, through to hosting and staging their own annual three-day festival Sabaton Open Air, touring with Iron Maiden and Judas Priest, and accumulating over 3 billion streams, SABATON most recently blew Aussie fans away onstage at Good Things Festival in 2022; and 2025 is primed for a jaw-dropping headline extravaganza from these Swedish metal warriors. Joakim Brodén talks to Hi Fi Way about the tour.

This tour will be one for the history books with a Sabaton headline tour here in Australia, that’s got to be something to get excited about?
Yeah, we’ve… I don’t think we ever headlined. I think we did a small headline show back a long time ago, when we were touring either with Nightwish or something like that. We did one in-between, a small headliner. But, yeah, it’s about time, I’d say.

It sounds like it is all happening for Sabaton, I don’t know how you guys fit it all in.
Well, it’s not been too busy. I mean, we used to be way busier a bunch of years back, so let’s say a decade ago, it was kind of brutal. We would do one hundred and seventy shows in a twelve-month period, and then on top of everything else we do. At that point, we realised, oh shit, we got to slow down here, so we don’t burn out totally. But now it’s been pretty good. We’re lucky in that sense, as we’ve gotten bigger as a band, that we have the opportunity to not have to say yes to everything all the time. We usually do, because we actually like playing heavy metal, but we have the opportunity to say no every once in a while.

Touring with Amaranthe as well, that makes for a great double bill as well?
Yeah, we’ve toured with them before, they joined us on the pre-pandemic tour in 2019 when we had them in Europe, so we have known them since, which is quite some time back, and it worked out great. I think it’s good music and nice people, and that’s all we really need for a tour.

Are you bringing the full stage production to some of these venues around the country?
As much as we can bring, as much as space, allowances and budget allowances will let us! We’d like to, but we couldn’t bring the whole European stage set because we play to fifteen to twenty thousand there, and not that many in Australia. But we’re bringing as much as we possibly can, and it’s going to be good to do a proper long shows as well in Australia, because usually we’ve been playing shorter sets which forces us into playing the same songs as well, because some of them are must-play songs. With a one and a half hour set or something like that, we can play a more challenging set list if you will, and something that more hardcore fans are going to enjoy as well.

So what is it about Australia that you look forward to when on tour?
The people, probably the friendliest population on planet Earth, at least as far as I’ve seen. I think I’m going to like the climate now, because it’s kind of brutal for us Scandinavian polar bears when it’s your summer. So, I’m hoping to like the weather now as well.

With eleven albums what does the Australian tour set list look like? Nice challenge to have trying to fit everything in?
We do have some new singles out, so there might be something from the new album, but the plan is because we haven’t headlined over there, really, there’s a whole bunch of songs we never played live for our Australian audience. It feels like we should focus on what we haven’t done and what’s been played a lot in Europe. So when we come back, hopefully, this is going to work out well enough that we can do more headline tours. The plan is to come back during the Legends cycle once the album is out, and then we can focus on the newer stuff.

Is this the most exciting period for the band with build up to the releases of the new album Legends about to come out in October?
It’s a nervous time, for sure. I mean, the album feels kind of old to us now, because it’s been a while since we recorded it, but it’s always fun to see how people react. It’s one of the few times I’m actually reading the comments on social media is when we release new stuff, because I’m genuinely interested in finding out what people think about it.

Do you think the sounds actually change much in between albums?
That depends on the band. For us, yes and no. I mean, this is a bigger departure from The War to End All Wars than was from The Great War, I’d say it’s also natural, considering the topics of the album and the vocabulary being used. Both Great War and The War to End All Wars, obviously World War I albums. It puts you in a specific place, sort of, emotionally, which reflects in the music. Technologically, I mean, what’s available in warfare, which also affects your vocabulary used when writing the lyrics, and how the songs and that time and era feels. Now, with Legends, I’d say it’s a bit of a departure, it’s an evolution. We’re dealing with Senusret III, Egyptian pharaoh from 1800 before Christ, up until everything in between until Napoleon in the 1800s after Christ. So, we’re naturally moving in different areas, and I’d say it’s probably a more diverse album. It’s probably got a bit of a more cinematic sound to it.

How much research goes into some of these songs? Lyrically, they’re quite deep, and like you said, the stories behind them are quite substantial and detailed.
That’s very different for every song. There is a certain amount of research that goes into everything, but we might have very different starting points. I mean, let’s say I’m genuinely interested in military history, so when I’m starting to research Napoleon, my starting point is well advanced ahead of what I might have on something I’ve never heard about before. So, it’s really hard to judge from a general perspective, because there might also be I didn’t know that much in advance. Maybe by pure luck, I came across the right book that was an inspiring read, which gave me a lot of ideas for lyrics. Sometimes you’re just reading book upon book, upon book, or watching all the documentaries you can, and you don’t even know where to start.

Has there been anything through doing the research for some of these songs that it’s really taken you by surprise, and you found quite astonishing?
I would say one that sticks out is The Duelist, this has been released already. I’d heard about Miyamoto Musashi, you know, the samurai, but haven’t dug into him very much. But the philosophical side about him writing books was new to me. That also made it very hard to write the lyrics. I started quite a lot. Even more than I needed for the lyrics, but I wanted to learn more, and there was so much that fascinated me about him that I had a hard time knowing where to start. Then the cycle of songs, Senusret III of Egypt. I don’t think I have come across the name, but I’m not sure. At least it was unfamiliar to me when he popped up on our radar, and I think it was Pär who suggested it, and I had to totally read up on everything.

How hard was it to get the tracks in the right order for the album? Did it take quite a bit of considered thought in terms of how you would place them on the album?
Yes and no. I mean, it wasn’t brutally hard, because we already, pretty early on, gave up on the idea of having them all chronologically because it wouldn’t make for a nice listening experience. We noticed in the past when we did the albums about World War I, sometimes you’re singing about a person, or they existed during X amount of time, and a lot of other stuff that happened in that conflict, or maybe on that album, would happen around the same time. The only time we went totally chronological was Carolus Rex back in 2012 and that was a fucking brutal, pardon my language, track list to make, because you were planning your songwriting process, and the lyric writing process was like an extra layer of complexity added throughout everything you do. If it makes sense, we’d like to go back to doing things chronologically, but especially for this album, it wouldn’t make sense at all.

Does that make it easier when you start integrating these songs into the live set, that it doesn’t really matter where they are played in the live show?
It’s more about what would happen show-wise, because there’s always that to take into consideration. I mean, especially playing in Europe, some songs might have these types of pyrotechnic effects, there might be snowfall, might be flamethrowers, might be dress changes and everything. If we were to add playing things in chronological order on top of all of those things, we might have all of the slow songs with all the fire and none of the lights in the beginning of the show.

Once you’ve got the lyrics, does it get harder again when you actually have to start thinking about the music and how it ties in with the song, or is that the easy part?
Oh, it’s different. Some songs are written with a topic or theme in mind. Most of them, I would say, I would know what it’s about. There are some I know exactly the topic or thing, or even start writing the lyrics at the same time, or get ideas for lyrics, I should say. It’s rare that they’re finalised at the same time, but having not only musical demos, but also lyrical demos happens sometimes. There’s also times where I just write a song in between tours when we haven’t decided what the next album’s going to do, and I just had a great idea, and it turns out it was fitting for one of the subjects that we had. Then it goes on to one of those, well, in this case, one of the legendary groups or persons. If we don’t have anything fitting for it, then that song rests, because we’re going make more albums.

Was that exciting seeing these songs come together in the studio, once it all started getting to completion?
It’s always fun, because there’s always some songs that get better than you expected, and there are some songs that turn out not as good as you hoped, which is sad. On the other hand, we’ve been doing this for so long now that even when writing the song, if I’m sitting here in the studio, pre-production studio, writing it and it’s going to be recorded in a year later. In my head, I can still, in, let’s say, eight five percent of the cases I can imagine the end result already.

Is there any more scope to expand the Legends concept further?
I don’t know if we’re going to do anything more on the Legends topic, but there are a few, like Alexander the Great. There’s a bunch of these guys that we just didn’t have the right music for. So, if we’re doing some more singles, I don’t know, or if we’re doing EPs, I don’t know, or if we’re doing another Legends album, I don’t know. All I know is there are a bunch of these people that I think deserve to be on the album that we didn’t cover. We sing about military history and legendary warriors. To be honest, we could make fifteen more albums on this topic, so where do you stop? I don’t know!

Interview By Rob Lyon

Catch Sabaton on tour with Amaranthe on the following dates, tickets from Destroy All Lines…