Amon Amarth release The Allfather Awakens on 2 October through Metal Blade. Johan Hegg and Ted Lundström talked about it with Steve Harkins on TalkShopLive, and were careful about one thing: it is themed, not a concept album.
“Most of the songs, they are in one way or another connected to the Norse god Oden,” Hegg said. The record goes into the mythology around him and also into the history, into what the Vikings actually did with that god, which is a different question from what the myths say about him.
The origin story Hegg gave is smaller than the music. “I didn't get interested in them until my sister actually wrote with pencil runes on her wall,” he said. “I was maybe, like, nine or 10, and I was amazed that we had this written language in Sweden from a thousand years ago.” After the wall came a Danish comic series called Valhalla, and after that everything else.
Lundström gave the practical version. When they started writing music in 1992 the problem was Stockholm: too many bands, all of them doing the same thing. “We were just looking for our own little genre, to stand out,” he said. A couple of bands had written about Vikings before them, not many. It was a very small genre, and then it was not.