Amon Amarth reveal some insight about working on their new album ‘The Allfather Awakens’

In a recent appearance on TalkShopLive with Steve Harkins, Amon Amarth frontman Johan Hegg and bassist Ted Lundström opened up about their forthcoming album, “The Allfather Awakens”, due October 2 via Metal Blade Records, as per Blabbermouth. While the Norse deity Odin once again serves as the thematic and visual anchor, Hegg clarified that the album is not a strict concept record, but rather a collection of historical tales centered on conflict and sacrifice.

It’s a themed album, I would say, where most of the songs, not all of the songs, but most of the songs, they are in one way or another connected to the Norse god Oden. And it’s dipped into a lot of the mythological aspects of Oden from Norse mythology, but also some historical motifs as well, when it comes to Viking history and the Vikings’ relations to that god, so to speak. – Johan Hegg

During the chat, the duo reflected on their childhood fascination with Viking folklore.

I was interested in Vikings from when I was very young. And I think it started in a really silly way in a way because I was interested in history in general. Obviously I knew about Vikings, but I didn’t get interested in them until my sister actually wrote with pencil runes on her wall. And I was amazed. I was maybe, like, nine or 10, and I was amazed that we had this written language in Sweden from a thousand years ago. So that’s kind of where my interest started, and then I found that this awesome comic book series called the Valhalla series by a Danish cartoonist. And, yeah, it just rolled on from there, basically. – Johan Hegg

[Vikings were] an interest from a young age. And then when we started the band, when we [began working on music in] ’92, we were just looking for our own little genre, to stand out from all the other bands in Stockholm and Sweden at the time. So we kind of put our interest from the Viking mythology into the band, which worked really good for us. There were a couple of bands before us that wrote about Vikings, but it was not too many, so it was kind of like a very small genre. – Ted Lundström

They also discussed working with producer Jacob Hansen.

It was the first time we worked with him, and it was great. He’s a good guy. – Johan Hegg

We went to [Jacob] on a previous tour we did in Europe. We had a day off in Denmark, so we called him up and said, ‘We wanna come and have a chat and have a look at the studio.’ So we got a good day talking to him about what we wanted to do and asking him what he could bring from his side to the new production, and everything felt really good. So he was very, very easy to work with. It was very smooth sailing, the whole recording session. – Ted Lundström

Were there any moments when they wished Hansen would leave?

No, no, definitely not. I think maybe the other way around because I kept wanting to do other new takes and different versions of what I already did. But no, it was super smooth. I think he was very open to our ideas, I think, and what we wanted out of this recording. And then he came up, as far as I remember anyways, he came up with some cool ideas to enhance the whole production. – Johan Hegg

The band also discussed the songwriting approach.

In the past, after we were finished with touring, we started the new album. But this time, since the touring was much longer than we anticipated in the beginning — we got a lot of cool tours we couldn’t say no to — so we started, or mainly the guitar players, Olavi [Mikkonen] and Johan [Söderberg], they were starting riffing already and bouncing ideas on the tour, actually. So when we were finished touring for the last album, we already had a head start with a couple of good songs already in the backpack. – Ted Lundström

I also remember that for the first time… One of the things is that we haven’t had a proper rehearsal room for over a decade. And I know especially Olavi misses the chance to work on his ideas in a rehearsal room environment. And I think one of the reasons why it worked really well to work on tour was that we could have a warm-up room with a setup with drums, like digital drums and small amplifiers, and they could jam out the songs in there, which I know that Olavi really likes to do. So I think that’s also one of the reasons why it worked so well, that we had to write on tour, that we had that opportunity. – Johan Hegg

They also revealed their recording approach for the LP: instead of tracking instruments individually across the entire record, the band chose to complete each song one track at a time.

Yeah, that was one of the ideas we brought to Jacob, asking him if he was okay with doing [it] song by song, and we also divided the whole album into two studio sessions. So we basically just had five or six songs each time, just to be able to focus 100 percent on each song. Because if you record 10 songs in a row, you really get like… It’s so much riffs in your head, so it just gets less quality in a way. So we recorded like one song at the time with drums, bass, guitars, vocals, and it also gave Johan a lot of time to rest his voice until the next song was ready for vocals. So it was kind of a very relaxing and 100% focus on each song. – Ted Lundström

And also the benefit is that you record the full song, and then you can leave it. And then at the end of the session, you come back and listen to the songs and see, ‘All right, is there anything here we need to change? Is there anything that doesn’t really work here? Would it be better to have this kind of drum fill instead of that?’ And working the way we used to in the past, where you record all the drums for all the songs and then you break down the drums, then you can’t change any drums, for instance, at the end of the recording session. So it is a good way to work because you can always do a bit of changes here and there… For the first session we had six songs, and we recorded those. And then we had to record a couple of more songs, but we had to write them first as well. – Johan Hegg