Sabaton’s tenth album, The War to End All Wars, will be released on March 4, 2022 (Nuclear Blast). Written and recorded in 2021 during the COVID global pandemic, the band has crafted a concept album of 11 brand new songs that dive deep into previously unexplored atrocities, miracles and events tied to the early 20th century’s World War I.
Since Sabaton’s inception on the threshold of the 21st century, these fierce Swedes have been conquering battlefield after battlefield – of course, only those musical front lines – and along this intrepid path, Sabaton has practically done and seen it all within the realms of explosive heavy metal.
We talk to frontman Joakim Brodén about the latest album, the continuation of the World War 1 story from the previous album The Great War and much more.
On the continuation of The Great War story and how the pandemic became the catalyst for the idea:
Joakim: I don’t think this album would have come out at all, or at least not until maybe two years from now if it wasn’t for the pandemic or something like that. We went home from touring in Russia in March of 2020 and at that point we didn’t know really what to do with ourselves so we started to first of all, take care of all these things we all had like, ‘I’ll do that later when I have time’. All of a sudden we had time so we did that and that didn’t take that long so we decided to start writing music and we had sort of ideas for songs, or topics and stories. We felt that on The Great War we really wanted to do the story of Harlem Hellfighters, we really wanted to do Christmas Truce but we didn’t have the right music so the start was to sort of continue along those lines, maybe two seperate songs. But as the pandemic dragged out we decided, ‘Oh we can make another album’ and we had a lot of ideas from friends and fans, everything from emails to books with stories that even though we did quite a lot of research I can say for World War I for The Great War album, there was still a huge amount of stories that we didn’t know about basically. Like oh shit, how did we not know about this! That in combination of having the tour cut off from The Great War, I mean we did parts of the world but we never went to Australia, Japan, South America on that tour. So if we had done something totally different like Napoleonic era stuff, then maybe the World War I songs that we never got to play in a lot of countries would feel irrelevant. So we figured if we have a chance now to sort of tell the stories we felt like we wanted to tell but we but we didn’t have the right music, we also have a chance to catch up which never happens! We catch up on those stories that we find out after the fact when we made the album and then it will make total sense now if we come to Japan or Australia and we play songs also from The Great War album together with The War To End All Wars.
The new album is being released as two different versions with one version featuring a historic account of the war in context with the songs:
Joakim: I’d recommend anyone listening to the album the first couple of times to do it with the history edition because you will have a story teller in between the songs to sort of set the scene for you. I mean unless you’re really into history you’re not going to be…depending on where you’re based of course. I mean if you are from the Balkans you might know it but let say most people listening to the album won’t know about the Battle of Bulair and what happened on the Balkan front during those times, so you really get that information. It makes it easier for you to understand the lyrics and understand the song.
On the 20th anniversary of Sabaton and the longevity of the band:
Joakim: All of these things come and go when you have these moments when you sit down and you think about them but they are only short moments in time when we pass, ‘Oh we’ve been doing this for 20 years, oh that’s half my life’, and that’s something that sometimes pop into your head and then you spend that moment to think about it. But we’re pretty busy people and we’re always on to the next thing which means we don’t spend much time thinking about those things, for good and bad. In many cases that also means not enjoying the moment sometimes because you’re always mentally on the next thing. Sometimes it’s good I don’t have the time to think about the fact I’m getting old [laughs]. Sometimes it’s bad because sometimes I don’t appreciate really what we’ve done or can enjoy it sometimes because I feel like I’m always mentally on the next, I start planning the next album even before this album was readily mixed almost.
Check out the full interview
Watch on Youtube: https://youtu.be/3X3hGB3KDc0
Listen on Spotify: https://spoti.fi/3KiSax1
Get The War To End All Wars here: https://smarturl.it/SabatonTWTEAW
Physical copies here: https://www.jbhifi.com.au
