Joining Up With The Vikings

Amon Amarth are pretty comfortable with their lyrical choices. Vikings, vikings and more vikings. Given the role of epic tales in Nordic literature it's incredible that it's taken the band until their tenth LP to deliver a fully fledged concept album. Jomsviking (Jomsvikings were an 11^th century band of Viking mercenaries) tells of a viking warrior's tale of tragedy, pride and revenge — with a good dose of axe-fuelled mayhem thrown in.

"The album is about a man who is taken away from the love of his life and then he accidentally kills a guy and has to flee his land."

"The idea to do a concept album came from our vocalist Johan [Hegg]," says Soderberg. "He'd written a movie script in his own time just to see if he could pull it off. He ended up with 140 pages or something and thought it might be a good idea to use some of it for a concept album. He presented the idea to us and we thought it was great and started to rework some of the script into lyrics. The album is about a man who is taken away from the love of his life and then he accidentally kills a guy and has to flee his land. He joins up with a group of mercenary warriors called the Jomsvikings and eventually comes back home to get his revenge. It's just a really great story and fits our band so well."

For many years Amon Amarth had a very stable line-up. Recently though this changed with drummer Fredrik Andersson departing after 17 years. Soderberg is matter of fact, and somewhat tight-lipped about the split. "We had a good many years with Fredrik," he offers. "There's no big drama behind the scenes but like any relationship sometimes you have to go separate ways — and that's all it was. For this album we used an old friend of ours called Tobias Gustafsson, and he did a fantastic job for us. He won't be the permanent drummer for us though. After the album was finished we started trying out drummers and we've now found a guy who will start touring with us. We'll have to see how it turns out — I can't tell you his name yet although I will say he's not a well known drummer — but that's where we are at right now."

For Jomsviking Amon Amarth again called in producer Andy Sneap, who had already proved his worth by delivering a fiery production job on 2013's Deceiver Of The Gods. "Andy was very laid-back to work with compared to someone like Jens Bogren," explains Soderberg. "What really helps is that Andy loves classic heavy metal, he grew up on it just like we all did. So basically he speaks the same musical language we do and that really meant that making the album was very smooth."

Apart from sounding simply immense Jomsviking is also marked by a return to the catchy hooks that made Twilight Of The Thunder God the band's most successful release to date. Was this songwriting shift deliberate? "It's great that people have noticed that in these songs," says Soderberg. "I think the reason this shift happened is that writing a concept album was almost like writing music for a film, so we got those real emotional peaks and lows in the music. I also think having a new drummer meant there was more 'air' in our sound which really helped the melodies be more prominent."