There are bands you listen to because the riffs hit hard, the songs get into your blood and they sound fucking enormous when you crank them. Then there are bands that send you somewhere beyond the music itself. Amon Amarth have always been both of those bands for me.
Part of my own family roots stretch back through Denmark, and over the years Amon Amarth have repeatedly sent me disappearing down rabbit holes into Norse history, mythology and the stories of the old Scandinavian world. I’ll hear something buried inside an Amon Amarth song, start wondering where the story came from, and before I know it I’m three hours deep into history and occasionally learning something about my own heritage along the way.
That connection is one of the things I have always loved about this band, but none of it would matter if Amon Amarth didn’t also keep delivering absolutely fucking massive heavy metal.
More than three decades into their journey, the Swedish melodic death metal titans are preparing to unleash album number thirteen, The Allfather Awakens, on October 2 through Metal Blade Records. I caught up with founding bassist Ted Lundström to dig into a record that still sounds unmistakably like Amon Amarth while allowing this battle hardened unit to push into territory they haven’t explored before.
STILL FINDING NEW GROUND AFTER THREE DECADES
When I was preparing for the interview, one old Ted Lundström comment kept coming back to me. Around the release of The Great Heathen Army, Ted had described Amon Amarth as having played things relatively safe on that record.
Fast forward four years and The Allfather Awakens feels considerably less interested in staying inside comfortable boundaries.
Ted doesn’t see that evolution as any one member deliberately dragging the band somewhere new. After this long together, Amon Amarth operate more like one creative organism.
“I think this is some kind of organic thing,” Ted explained. “We’ve been together as a band for such a long time, so we’re kind of a unit when it comes to creating music and lyrics and artworks and all that kind of thing.”
Rather than one person deciding it was time to reinvent something, everybody contributes towards the same larger vision. That probably goes some way towards explaining why even the stranger turns on The Allfather Awakens never feel like Amon Amarth trying to escape their own identity. It is still recognisably them. They’ve simply widened the walls around what “them” can mean.
MAKING THE ALBUM ONE SONG AT A TIME
The change wasn’t only in what Amon Amarth wrote. The actual process behind The Allfather Awakens shifted as well.
Normally, the band would finish touring before properly turning their attention towards another album. This time, opportunities kept appearing on the road that were simply too good to knock back, pushing the usual schedule sideways. Instead of waiting, Amon Amarth began properly developing songs while touring.
That gave them a head start, but the biggest difference came when recording began with producer Jacob Hansen in Denmark.
Rather than entering the studio with an entire album hanging over their heads, Amon Amarth split the recording across two sessions. The first arrived in the spring of 2025 and covered roughly half the record. Even more importantly, they completed each track individually before moving to the next.
“We could focus one hundred percent on each song because you didn’t have twelve songs in your head that you have to put down during five or six weeks,” Ted told me.
“We finished one song with everything, drums, guitars, vocals and solos, before we moved on to the next song.”
That sounds like a simple change, but you can hear the results. The Allfather Awakens feels like a collection of songs that have each been allowed to develop their own personality rather than pieces rushed through an album production line.
FINDING THE BASS UNDER THOSE FUCKING GUITARS
Of course, when you have Ted Lundström sitting in front of you, you have to geek out on the bass for a minute.
Amon Amarth have always had those fucking enormous guitars. Between the twin melodies, the rhythm guitar weight and the drums underneath it all, Ted occupies an interesting position inside the band’s sound. His bass has to connect those worlds without disappearing beneath them.
That balance shifted again on The Allfather Awakens as the guitars moved away from the more modern 5150 sound and towards Marshalls.
For Ted, the fundamental structure of his playing doesn’t suddenly change, but the sonic space around it does.
“I’m between the drums and the guitars,” he explained. “I have to fill out that area.”
The more old school guitar approach was designed to bring those guitars further forward, and when one part of that sonic wall moves, everything else has to find its place around it. Hansen then becomes another important part of the equation, taking the performances and gluing that enormous Amon Amarth sound together through the mix.
It’s one of those details listeners might not consciously think about while a riff is taking their fucking head off, but it helps explain why an album can feel recognisably Amon Amarth while having a noticeably different physical weight underneath it.
“FUCKING MAN, LET’S TRY IT”
Then Amon Amarth did something nobody was really expecting.
After more than thirty years, they made an acoustic song.
“Upphaf” doesn’t sound like somebody unplugged a normal Amon Amarth track and called it a day. The space around the music completely changes, yet somehow the band’s identity remains intact.
For Ted, that stripped back world meant playing a much more foundational role rather than filling every available space.
“It’s a very different song from a classic Amon Amarth song in the way you play it,” he said. “But that’s also what’s fun about it, and that’s the reason we tried it. We never done anything like this before.”
The idea originally came from Olavi Mikkonen, and Ted remembers the rest of the band essentially responding with, “Yeah, fucking man, let’s try it and see what happens.”
What makes the story even better is that “Upphaf” wasn’t necessarily guaranteed a place on The Allfather Awakens when they recorded it. It began as an experiment.
The experiment fucking worked.
EXPECTING THE BACKLASH THAT NEVER REALLY CAME
That left Amon Amarth with another problem. When you have an album built around making every song strong enough to stand individually, how the hell do you decide which tracks become singles?
Ted has spoken about that internal battle before, and The Allfather Awakens didn’t exactly make the decision easier. Not only did they have to choose the songs, they had to decide the order in which people would experience them.
So Amon Amarth decided to fuck with everyone.
They put the acoustic song out early.
“We did this kind of crazy thing,” Ted laughed. “Let’s release the acoustic song first to see what people think.”
The band were preparing themselves for a flood of hatred. Instead, the response was considerably more accepting than they expected. Some fans naturally started wondering whether Amon Amarth had suddenly made an entire acoustic record, only for “Gjallarhorn” to arrive soon afterwards and smash everyone firmly back into more familiar territory.
It was a clever way of showing just how wide the boundaries of this album could stretch without giving away the whole game.
TED’S ONE TO WATCH: “KVASIR’S BLOOD”
So far we’ve heard “We Rule the Waves,” “Upphaf,” “Gjallarhorn” and the steamrolling “Eight Legs of Thunder,” but there is still a sizeable chunk of The Allfather Awakens waiting for everyone to get their hands on.
I was lucky enough to hear the whole thing before speaking with Ted, so naturally I wanted to know which unreleased song he was most excited for everybody else to finally discover.
His current choice is “Kvasir’s Blood.”
Ted pointed towards the song’s dynamics as one of the things that keeps pulling him back. Instead of simply hitting at one intensity from beginning to end, “Kvasir’s Blood” moves between quieter spaces and more aggressive eruptions, with Johan Hegg’s whispered vocal textures adding another dimension underneath it.
That answer made complete sense after hearing the album. It is another example of Amon Amarth understanding that heaviness becomes even more effective when you give it somewhere to rise from.
And yes, it is a fucking cool track.
MUSIC AS A DOORWAY INTO HISTORY
That brought me back to something much more personal.
Having Danish heritage myself, Amon Amarth have often become a doorway into researching Norse history and my own Scandinavian roots. The mythology is obviously a huge part of the band’s identity, but after thirteen albums and more than thirty years, surely there must come a point where you think you’ve already heard every story?
Apparently not.
“There’s always something new you can find,” Ted told me.
Johan remains the band’s resident historian, continually digging through the material and bringing stories to the rest of Amon Amarth that even they haven’t necessarily encountered before.
Sometimes it isn’t about discovering a completely unknown story either. An old tale can suddenly reveal a different angle, another interpretation or something previously sitting unnoticed inside it.
That, for me, is part of the enduring power of what Amon Amarth do. These aren’t museum pieces being dusted off and repeated exactly as they were handed down. The stories keep being examined, interpreted and pushed through the sound of five Swedish metalheads until they become something alive again.
EIGHT FUCKING LEGS OF THUNDER
The latest taste of that world comes through “Eight Legs of Thunder,” inspired by Sleipnir, Oden’s legendary eight legged horse.
The song does exactly what the title suggests.
It fucking gallops.
There’s a charging physical momentum running underneath it, and Ted says that feeling was obvious almost immediately when the music came together.
He described it as feeling like a “Panzer wagon coming towards you,” with the massive wall of melodies creating the image of that enormous eight legged beast in motion.
“As soon as you hear it, you kind of go into that,” Ted said. “It was clear from day one. This song is all about Sleipnir.”
That is another fascinating insight into Amon Amarth’s writing. Even when the music begins before the finished lyrical story, sometimes the sound itself tells everybody exactly where the song wants to go.
BUILDING THE NEXT AMON AMARTH WORLD
Amon Amarth albums have never existed solely through headphones, speakers or vinyl grooves.
Eventually these songs have to become part of an Amon Amarth show, and at this point that means considerably more than five blokes standing underneath some lights and smashing through a set.
The band grew up watching Iron Maiden and KISS turn heavy music into spectacle, and now they finally have the ability to build those kinds of worlds themselves.
That process begins much earlier than people might realise.
“When we write the song, we have the live feeling in our heads,” Ted explained. “You think already when you write it how this is going to turn out on stage.”
Lights, stage props, pyro and whatever ridiculous idea somebody comes up with next all become part of the discussion.
With The Allfather Awakens, Amon Amarth are building an entirely new production inspired by Oden’s Golden Hall, and according to Ted the work that goes into creating the show can take almost as much time as making the record itself.
That makes sense. An Amon Amarth tour is no longer simply supporting an album. It is building a physical world around it.
THE ROW BELONGS TO EVERYBODY NOW
Then there is something Amon Amarth didn’t actually create themselves.
The Row.
What began organically among fans has grown into one of the most instantly recognisable crowd rituals in heavy music, spreading far beyond an Amon Amarth pit and most recently appearing among football supporters during the 2026 World Cup.
Ted told me the attention around that became fairly crazy, particularly across Sweden and Norway, with his phone constantly lighting up as media outlets chased reactions.
What I really wanted to know, though, was whether he remembered the moment where this strange thing happening on the floor stopped being just a few people fucking around and became part of Amon Amarth itself.
Interestingly, he didn’t even see the earliest example from the stage. He first saw footage online.
From there it grew slowly, driven completely by the fans rather than the band.
“The fans themselves been doing it. It’s not really our thing,” Ted explained. “They did it for us, and then when we wrote a song about it for them, it was kind of like a homage to this, and now it’s kind of like our thing.”
That feels like the perfect explanation.
Amon Amarth didn’t invent The Row.
Their fans gave it to them.
COULD AMON AMARTH RETURN TO AUSTRALIA IN 2027?
And because I’m an Aussie, there was no fucking chance Ted was getting away without this one.
Amon Amarth last visited Australia for Knotfest in 2023. With the scale of the production continuing to grow and the Golden Hall about to become another huge part of their live world, getting everything to the other side of the planet obviously becomes an increasingly complicated and expensive exercise.
But there is some encouraging news.
“I think there is in the plans to come to Australia during 2027,” Ted revealed.
He was very clear that nothing has been finalised yet, with the band currently working through its wider 2027 touring schedule and hoping to reach as many parts of the world as possible.
How much of the full production could make the journey would inevitably depend on shipping, costs and logistics, but Australia is at least part of those conversations.
So no, this isn’t a tour announcement.
But it is a pretty fucking good reason for Australian Amon Amarth fans to keep their eyes open.
Ted himself finished our conversation with much the same message: pick up the album, and hopefully they’ll see us in 2027.
THE ALLFATHER AWAKENS
After thirteen albums, the easiest thing Amon Amarth could do would be to know exactly what works and keep feeding the machine.
The Allfather Awakens doesn’t do that.
Instead, Amon Amarth have played with the recording process, stripped everything down for an acoustic experiment, pushed further into dynamics, returned towards more old school guitar sounds and still emerged with an album Ted says feels completely unified despite how different some of these songs are from one another.
That was ultimately what surprised him most when the final mix came together.
All these different ideas still sounded like they belonged beside each other.
Nothing felt like a regret. Nothing felt like it had wandered onto the wrong record.
After more than three decades, Amon Amarth still know exactly who they are.
They’re just finding new fucking ways to be it.
Amon Amarth release The Allfather Awakens on October 2 through Metal Blade Records.
Pre-Save / Pre-Order The Allfather Awakens Here
https://lnk.to/TheAllfatherAwakens
Amon Amarth:
Johan Hegg – Vocals
Olavi Mikkonen – Guitar
Johan Söderberg – Guitar
Ted Lundström – Bass
Jocke Wallgren – Drums
