Swedish metallers SABATON will enter the studio “in a few days” to begin recording their next album. The upcoming LP will be the follow-up to “The Great War”, which came out in July 2019 via Nuclear Blast Records. The band’s 20th-anniversary record was a concept effort covering stories from the First World War.
The news of SABATON‘s recording plans was broken earlier today in a Christmas video message from singer Joakim Brodén and his bandmates. He said: “Hello everyone. Here we are on Christmas eve, and we just wanna take the chance to say thanks to all of you for being fantastic fans in tough times. However, we do have some good news, and that is, in a few days, we’re gonna go into the studio and record the next SABATON album.”
On Wednesday (December 23), SABATON released a short teaser for a brand new song. In a message accompanying the YouTube clip, the band wrote: “We bet you did not see this one coming.. Are you ready for some new SABATON music? Wait no more! Hear now a teaser of one of our upcoming songs..”
Earlier this week, SABATON surpassed one million subscribers on its YouTube channel. To celebrate this, as part of their Advent Calendar, they surprise-released an animated video for their hymn “No Bullets Fly”, taken from their “Heroes” album. The clip tells the story of Franz Stigler and Charlie Brown, two (enemy!) pilots in the second world war. While Charlie‘s plane was severely damaged and the pilot hurt, Franz decided, instead of shooting him down, to risk his own life and escort him to safety. Both survived, and over 50 years later, they met each other again and became very close friends. A lovely story that did not became public before 1990.
SABATON started recording “The Great War” exactly 100 years after the end of the First World War (November 11, 1918) and took three months of intensive work to complete the album with longtime producer and collaborator Jonas Kjellgren at Black Lounge studios. The disc was mastered by Maor Appelbaum and the artwork was once again created by Peter Sallaí.
“This is not the first time we sing about stories from this period in time, but now we felt the timing was right to make a full concept album about this war,” the band said.
SABATON‘s latest disc is the group’s first with guitarist Tommy Johansson (GOLDEN RESURRECTION, REINXEED), who replaced Thobbe Englund in 2016.
