Sabaton

Against a backdrop of thrashing riffs and growling bombast, Swedish power metal band Sabaton base their songs on historical military battles and true war-time stories. The band initially came together in 1999, but they were frustrated when their Italian record label Underground Symphony stalled on releasing their album, Metalizer, and so began creating a new sound. Taking inspiration from the invasion of Iraq which dominated the news at the time, they came up with the track “Panzer Battalion,” an explosive, power metal thunderstorm that tells of armored tanks of mass destruction. The idea developed and turned into the album Primo Victoria (2005), which featured songs about German U-boats in WWII, the use of napalm in Vietnam and the Battle of Normandy and helped them establish a large fan base across Europe. Their following albums - Attero Dominatus (2006) and The Art of War (2008) - continued the military theme, and the band started their own festival in their hometown of Falun as well as touring the US and the UK. In the meantime, their original label finally released the Metalizer album in 2007, five years after it was recorded. Sabaton went through a significant line-up change in 2012 but led by front man and songwriter Joakim Brodén and founding bass player Pär Sundström, they topped the Swedish charts with Heroes (2014) and made the UK top 20 with their eighth studio album The Last Stand in 2016. They released their ninth studio album The Great War in July 2019. Sabaton returned in 2022 with the release of The War to End All Wars (2022), a sequel to their previous album The Great War.