Photo by Sylwia Makris & Christian Martin 

For nearly 30 years now, Swedish death metal giants Amon Amarth have invaded and pillaged the scene on their ascent to be one of the genre’s elite.

Their thunderous, speedpicked harmonies backing tales of Vikings and Norse gods have
captured the imagination of headbangers across generations. Along the way they’ve developed a stage show that would make even Iron Maiden or King Diamond jealous.

 

As they prepare to release their Oden-centric 13th studio album, The Allfather Awakens,
vocalist Johan Hegg talks to KNOTFEST about lyrical inspiration, showing their sense of humor in music videos, their first-ever acoustic song, and how they’re still finding ways to improve their iconic and instantly recognizable sound.

As they prepare to release their Oden-centric 13th studio album, The Allfather Awakens, vocalist Johan Hegg talks to KNOTFEST about lyrical inspiration, showing their sense of humor in music videos, their first-ever acoustic song, and how they’re still finding ways to improve their iconic and instantly recognizable sound.

This conversation has been condensed for length and clarity.

Was the decision to write songs while on tour a deliberate one or did it happen spontaneously? 

JOHAN HEGG: Olavivi Mikkonen and Johan Söderberg (guitarists) are the guys who write most of the music in general, but we haven't had a rehearsal room for over a decade now. We used to write in the rehearsal room and I know that Olavi, especially, missed that: hanging out, trying out ideas together as a band. We haven't really done that since we stopped having one.

I think this was perhaps the first time in our career where we actually had a designated warm up room on our tour. We had a digital drum set and amplifiers and stuff, that's sort of like a rehearsal room. Let's try to use that and work out ideas while we're on the road. We have the time, we have the space, and we have the equipment for it. So I think that’s probably one of the main reasons why we decided to write on the tour in the first place.

However, for me personally I didn't write almost anything on tour. When it comes to the lyrics I want to be in a place where I can focus on a specific riff for an extended period of time. Or where I can focus on the lyrical idea and try to work it out without distractions. Rehearsal rooms are terrible for that.

So I didn't write a lot on tour. I worked on some ideas by myself, but I waited to finalize them until I had demos to work with. Then I could listen to the demos over and over again and try to figure out which lyrics fit to which song, and how to fit the vocal lines to it.

Why did you want to finish recording each song before moving on to the next one?

JH: We have worked this way since we recorded The Berserker, that was the first time we did it. The benefit of that, in my opinion, is that you can come back to that song later and listen to it and see what you need to rework. You can have a bit more fresh ears, and kind of let it rest for a while.

When you work too much on a song for a really long time, you start to get used to what you're hearing. It sounds right to you, even though maybe it's not the best thing. Maybe there's something slightly off that could be different

We actually (recorded The Allfather Awakens) during two recording sessions. Not only because we didn't have 10 songs for the first recording session – which we didn't, we only had six – but we wanted to focus on fewer songs.  Just to allow ourselves not to get into that studio fatigue.

Plus, it gave us a chance to go back to the first songs in the second session to see if there was something that we needed to change or add or remove. I kind of liked doing it that way and I think it worked out well in several aspects. But mostly because of the studio fatigue, where, as I said, it's easy to start thinking everything sounds great.

 

Did that affect the eventual sequencing of the tracks at all?

I think sequencing came together quite easy. We had a solid opening already from the beginning. We knew that “Gjallarhorn” was going to be the opening song. We also knew that the “Upphaf” acoustic song’s going to be in the middle. Then everything else just fell into place.

The only thing we were discussing at the end was that we actually recorded 11 songs for this album. It’s very rare that we record more songs than are on the album. We were discussing three songs, and one of them had to go.

Once we decided which one, it was kind of easy to see which would be the end song. I think it also felt very natural to have “Ascending Like an Eagle” as the end song. Not only because it’s over six minutes long, but it’s that majestic kind of epic song that’s good to end an album.

Once you have the start, the middle, and the end, everything else kind of tends to fall in place. So in my experience it was quite easy to get the sequencing right for this one.

Do you ever feel like you’re running out of material to write about Oden and Vikings, or is it the opposite where there’s way too much to cover even if you did 50 albums?

The beautiful thing about the Viking Age and the mythology– well, the mythology is what it is, but we learn new stuff about the history all the time. New things come up, new theories, new thoughts. And actually about the mythology, people interpret stuff and you can find different angles to things you didn’t really think about.

I would say that if you look at the entirety of the history and the mythology of the Viking Age society, there’s literally no limit to how far you can take that. There’s so many things you can do, and you can always get new angles on things that you already discussed as well. Maybe taking a perspective based on a certain character or a certain event. So I don’t see any limit really, it’s just about finding the right idea for the right songs.

I often use historical or mythological stories or themes as a metaphor for something else, but that’s because I like to work in metaphors. I don’t have to write about how I broke up with my girlfriend, so now I’m fucking sad and everything sucks. It’s much easier to write a song that’s like, my son just died, I have to bury him and I’m gonna go down with him myself.

And that helps other people relate to the lyrics too. These stories get into grief, resolution, moving on, all of those different things. They’re human stories.

That’s exactly the idea. “Fate of the Norns”, which is the song I just described, I was going through a tough time. I was breaking up with my girlfriend who I lived with at the time, and it was a difficult period, so I wrote this song.

A couple years later we played a festival in Belgium. This guy wrote to us on the forums and asked us to play that song because he lost his son at the age of six, and he said that song helped him through the grief.

So obviously, that’s exactly what you’re saying. This song helped someone with what it actually is talking about. The sense of loss and grief, which is the bigger picture here, rather than breaking up with someone.

We did play that song at the festival. I actually even saw the guy in the audience, because he was from Iceland and he was standing up front with an Icelandic flag. I told the story to the whole crowd and it was just this amazing electrical feeling when we played that song.

 

Lyrically, is there anything on this record that stands out as an exciting story that you finally got to tell, or something that evolved in a way that you didn’t expect?

“Gjallerhorn” is definitely one of them. I think it’s going to be a killer live song, obviously. So I have high expectations for that when it comes to performing it live.

But I think for the first time I’m actually very happy with the lyrics for all the songs. It’s one of those things where I just felt that everything came together in a good way. It’s hard to pick one favorite over another when it comes to lyrical ideas.

One song that I’m particularly happy with managing to put together is “Kvasir's Blood”. It took a lot of work in the studio to get the right phrasing for the vocals, and the right vocal lines in there. We experimented a little bit with a bunch of stuff. Especially the whispers, which I felt made the whole song really spooky and sinister. It really put the mood for the song, which is actually a brutal tale about murder and deceit.

Speaking about whispers, “Upphaf” has soft, quiet death growls as the acoustic ballad. How challenging was it for your voice to get those quiet but menacing dynamics?

Again it was one of those things where we had to experiment a little bit in the studio.

Originally, my idea was to have more clean vocals on that song. We tried it but it didn’t really work with the song. It sounded good, but it didn’t sound right, you know what I mean? It didn’t have the gravity, the heaviness that we wanted. Because even though it’s an acoustic song, it’s actually quite heavy. Then I think Olavi said, ‘Listen, you’re a growler, you should growl in this.’ And I was like, ‘how the fuck do I do that?’

One of the ideas I had was it should be more of a spoken thing, because the working title for the song at the beginning was called “Campfire”. We wanted to have lyrics which would be like sitting around the campfire telling a tale of some sort. I wanted to do something about the beginning of the universe in northern mythology. I tried some stuff but I couldn’t really get it to work, it just was corny.

 

Andy Sneap (producer, Exodus, Kreator, Arch Enemy) once told me that if you have trouble finding vocal lines, just take a page out of a book or something and try to sing that to the song. So I said why not just take from Norse mythology, The Prophecy of the Seer. The first five stanzas basically deal with the creation of the universe. I used that for the demo and it fit perfectly.

So I decided to go back and do that and treat the song like I was telling a story in the beginning. Just land the voice somewhere between talking and growling/singing. Then at the end, when the pitch goes up, you start going into the proper growls. It felt so right to do it that way.

I’m really happy how that turned out and I think it’s a cool song. That’s also one of the reasons why we stuck it in the middle because we didn’t want to hide it at the end.

The live show has become a huge and important part of the band. Comparing it now to the first time I saw you in 2006 with Children of Bodom and Gojira, it’s a night and day difference. In your experience, how did the shows go from five massive Swedish dudes headbanging in unison to inflatable serpents, Viking fights and fireworks?

It’s interesting that you brought up that tour, per se. That tour and the one before when we were opening for Trivium and Children of Bodom, both those tours were very important to our career. It kind of broke us in the United States in a way that we hadn’t been able to do before those tours.

Obviously, we were supporting. There was not room or money to bring any kind of production on those tours. So you had to present yourself as well as possible without any of that stuff. The way we always did it was to stand as far up front on stage as possible, always front the audience and always be close to them.

But I think we started incorporating a few set pieces on our stage in Europe right after that, actually. I know we had Viking shields on stage that were massive, and we started using pyros and stuff. Then we did the Wrath of the Norsemen DVD, which we recorded in Germany. Michael Trengert, who was the head of Metal Blade Europe at the time, put together a contest with Metal Hammer Germany advertising for people to come and be a part on stage as Viking reenactors. In armor and with weapons and stuff.

 

Trengert was also involved in the Summer Breeze Open Air Festival we were supposed to headline in 2009. He had these Viking fight guys build us a Viking ship and palisades, and that was the very first time we did that.

Then we just started incorporating more and more of those things on our tours. Obviously we weren’t at the stage yet where we could bring a Viking ship on every show that we played, but we could do other stuff. Just something to make the stage look more than just a rehearsal room with a stack of amplifiers and a set of drums.

That’s where it began, then we progressively tried to improve and build on that. Eventually we reached a point where we started to be able to bring this stuff almost anywhere, and we started making stuff we could scale up or down depending on the stage. It’s a gradual build, basically. There are no goals, it’s just a constant discussion of how to improve things.

The “Eight Legs of Thunder” video is such a fun departure from the usual Amon Amarth video. How did you all decide to make a Breaking Bad/spaghetti western sort of video to complement this charging, galloping song?

This idea I think came from Johan, and I think Olavi was also involved. It was a team effort, but from the other guys. I didn’t involve myself too much because I thought they had the ideas.

We sent it to Grupa 13, the company we wanted to work with, and they took the original idea and reworked it into this and we loved it. We thought it was hilarious. It has a lot of sense of humor, and we had lots of fun shooting it as well.

We’re a metal band, and metal might be heavy and brutal in many ways, but it’s still entertainment. We want to show people that sure, we’re a death metal band when it comes down to it, but we can make jokes at our own expense and we can have fun. It doesn’t have to be super serious about everything. How many videos can you do with Vikings in weapons and shields? They’re all going to wind up looking the same after a while.

Are you an experienced horserider?

I wouldn’t say I'm experienced, but I’ve taken some lessons. [laughs]

My wife loves horses, she’s actually at the stables right now. She looked around for a place where I could take riding lessons. My problem is I’m a heavy guy, so the horse we got was a massive, massive horse. It’s one of those horses you have in the forest when you pull our timber, basically. I learned to ride that one, but I could never get them to do the gallop because she’s too heavy.

Fortunately in the video I got a really nice horse. He was smaller than the one I was used to, but he was very nice. I think he got a little bit tired of carrying me around, so he lay down at one point and I just sat down on top of him. The stunt guy got him to stand up again, I just kept sitting on him and it was fine.

What do you want listeners to take away from The Allfather Awakens?

Musically, hopefully a good feeling that these are songs that really gives them energy. Lyrically, maybe some reflections on things in their own life and in the world in general.

One of the themes of this album obviously is Oden as the God of Wisdom and Knowledge, and how we need to get back to wisdom and knowledge as what we should aspire to as the human race. Move away from superstitious beliefs and opinion governing discussions. Like Ricky Gervais said, you can have your own opinions, but you can’t have your own facts.

So a little bit thinking about that, how wisdom and knowledge can be a bigger part of our life in general.

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Presenting the magnitude of The Allfather Awakens live, Amon Amarth will be touring throughout Europe and the United Kingdom later this year with support from Orbit Culture and Soilwork. A confirmed list of dates and cities can be found below. Tickets are available - HERE

The Allfather Awakens, the new album from Amon Amarth arrives October 2nd via Metal Blade Records. The album is available for pre-order - HERE