SABATON
Sabaton is a heavy metal band formed in Sweden in 1999; Sabaton started their musical endeavours in the city of ‘Falun’. The band consist of five members, front man Joakim Brodén, Hannes Van Dahl on Drums, Pär Sundström on Bass, Tommy Johansson on Lead Guitar and Chris Rörland on Lead Guitar.
Sabaton lyrics are shaped primarily around war and historical battles. Sabaton believes that history is important in their music because “People have been killing each other for millennium, people have made sacrifices and lost their lives and people are forgetting about these stories. They ask –“So why should we make up new stories? The ones who acutely made these sacrifice are being forgotten, no matter which country they fought for. I think it’s pretty important what’s behind us so we can avoid the same stuff happening in the future.”
Initially, Sabaton recorded 2 demo tapes, to promote their early work. These tapes were released in 2002, as a limited edition record called ‘Fist for Fight’. In 2005 Sabaton signed with ‘Black Lodge Label’ and released their album called ‘Primo Victoria’. In 2006 Sabaton released ‘Attero Dominatu’. Sabaton signed a deal with a record label called ‘Underground Symphony’ and recorded their first official album ‘Metalizer’ which took 2 years to released and didn’t reach the market place till 2007.
In 2008 Sabaton started a festival called ‘Rockstad: Falun’ festival, this festival was held inside an old military exercise building. This festival was originally started to promote their new album “The Art of War”. The festival was so successful Sabaton decided to make it a yearly event and the name of the festival changed to ‘Sabaton Open Air’.
In 2010, Sabaton released their album ‘Coat of Arms’ and they were quick to follow with their video clip ‘Uprising’ which was released on their new website. A second music video called the ‘Screaming Eagles’ this was released a few months later. Sabaton were asked “How do you choose your subjects and what is your process when you write a song?” they responded with “We have been sent in ideas since 2010. Since we did the ‘Cult of Arms’ album, we asked the fans to send in ideas. We have received well over 10 thousand ideas, we have enough to write a lot of material and they are all categorised. So at a later time we can pick them up when we see its fit to an album. When we get enough material for our music ready we start to plan for what kind of themes we will have on the album. We then decide upon a topic then we go to the library and find enough stuff to write about because people have been sadly killing each other for a very long time and there is no shortage of material for us.”
In 2011 Sabaton became increasingly popular across Europe, when they released their live album, ‘World War Live: Battle of the Baltic Sea’, this album featured a dozen tracks and was released in ten different countries. In 2012, Sabaton chased this success by releasing the album ‘Carolus Rex’, this album went gold on the charts in Poland and platinum on the charts in Sweden. In 2014, the band released their seventh album called ‘Heroes’, this album hit number one on the official Swedish album chart. In 2015 Sabaton performed their first concert in Japan in at ‘Loud Park’. In 2016 Sabaton announced their new album ‘The Last Stand’.
In 2017 Sabaton came to perform at Hellfest Open Air Festival, they were asked how they plan to evolve there stage performance over the following shows, Sabaton replied with “We have a lot of ideas on how to evolve our stage show as we like to have theme that are nice or visual. We have a lot of ideas for the future. You have seen a few of our ideas, and seen a bit of what we can do on stage. In the future we plan on doing a lot more with our stage show.”
At the conclusion of the interview they stated, “We just finished a big European tour earlier this year, for the current time we don’t have more shows in France. We enjoy it here and you haven’t seen the last of us.”
