Metal
Amon Amarth release “The Allfather Awakens” on 2 October through Metal Blade, and have explained that they changed their way of working to make it: instead of recording all the drums first, then all the bass and so on to the end, they finished each song completely before starting the next.
“We worked on one song at a time and made it as good as we could. Then we’d record it in full until it was completely finished: drums, guitars and vocals. Only then would we start the next one,” says guitarist Olavi Mikkonen.
Bassist Ted Lundström adds: “We had five or six songs at a time, so we could focus on them a hundred per cent. Recording a whole song gave Johan a lot of time to rest his voice.” The sessions were split into two blocks, spring 2025 and March 2026, at Jacob Hansen’s studio in Denmark. It’s the first album Hansen has produced for them.
The songs started on the road. Mikkonen and Johan Söderberg worked on riffs while touring, with a rehearsal room set up backstage with an electronic drum kit and amplifiers. Singer Johan Hegg says of Hansen that “he was very open to our ideas and to what we wanted from this album, while also bringing good suggestions that pushed the whole production forward.”
It’s ten tracks with a historical bent around Odin — the band stresses it’s not a concept album — with cover art by Tom Thiel, and the band’s first album since “The Great Heathen Army” (August 2022). One of the titles, “We Rule the Waves”, had already come out as a single on 17 July 2025, fourteen and a half months before the album containing it.
The European tour named after the album comes through Catalonia on 13 November at Sant Jordi Club in Barcelona, with Soilwork and Orbit Culture, followed the next day by the Palacio Vistalegre in Madrid. Advance tickets for both dates are listed as sold out.
Text by Roger Estivill