Sabaton have released Berserker, the first new song from a deluxe edition of Legends that Better Noise put out on 5 March.
The song is older than it sounds. Par Sundstrom says it took shape a few years ago and the band kept working on it rather than releasing it, waiting for a moment that suited it. For a group who write to a historical brief, holding a song back until it fits the campaign is a familiar kind of patience.
The subject is the berserker at Stamford Bridge, the lone Norseman who is supposed to have held the bridge against an English army in 1066 until somebody got underneath it and speared him from below. It is the one piece of that battle everybody remembers and nobody can verify.
An animated film of it arrives on Monday 9 November with the actor Eric Roberts in it, which is a sentence that could only be about this band.
The deluxe runs to a three disc digibook and double vinyl, and it lands while they are on their first American tour in four years.