Swedish death metal horde Amon Amarth’s new full-length has been titled Berserker and will hit stores on May 3rd via Metal Blade Records. A music video for the first single off the album, “First Raven”, is now streaming and can be heard/seen below. Frontman Johan Hegg spoke of the record, offering:
“The previous album was a concept album, but we didn’t want to get into a situation where every album has to be a concept record, so this is different. We wanted to step away from that and look at being a little bit more diverse, with the lyrics and everything else. I got ideas from lots of different things, from history stuff and mythological sources. Sometimes you just get something in your head and there doesn’t have to be a bigger meaning behind it — sometimes it’s just a great metal lyric that fits with a great metal song. And these are fucking great metal songs.
For me, this is Amon Amarth 2.0. I think what we’ve done here is give ourselves the space to explore other parts of our musicality and who we are as a band. If you’re content with where you’re at, what’s the point of continuing? We always want to come up with new ideas and find new ways of doing things and to create bigger and better shows and really try to improve every aspect of what the band is. We want to try to keep growing and to do this for as long as we have the possibility to do so, because this is the best fucking job in the world.”
The record was produced by Jay Ruston (Anthrax, Steel Panther, Stone Sour) at Sphere Studios in North Hollywood, CA. Pre-orders are available now at this link.
Berserker track listing:
- “Fafner’s Gold”
- “Crack The Sky”
- “Mjolner, Hammer Of Thor”
- “Shield Wall”
- “Valkyria”
- “Raven’s Flight”
- “Ironside”
- “The Berserker At Stamford Bridge”
- “We Can Set Our Sails”
- “When Once Again”
- “Wings Of Eagles”
- “Into The Dark”
