Ready to hear the fresh, innovative premise behind this new Sabaton album? It’s about war and conflicts throughout history—wowee!
By now, Sabaton’s blueprint for albums isn’t liable to change. They’ve got 11 of them now, and most are just variations on that theme, digging through the wars and battles that humankind have made commonplace throughout existence and giving it to appropriately high-sounding power-metal. Forget doing it in their sleep; at this point, they could do this while comatose. Still, you can’t fault Sabaton’s clear passion for history when they’ve been at it for this long with this consistency. (Plus, there’s a timeline on their website to date and chronologise every event they’ve written about, which is legitimately the coolest thing you could do with a project like this.)
Legends, meanwhile, is the same slight veering left that came with Sabaton’s 2014 album Heroes, to focus on individual figures rather than events (while still prioritising their military accomplishments, naturally). It’s noteworthy for going the furthest back in time that the band have explored, though it leaves some of their subjects feeling a bit…obvious. Like, Heroes was about named wartime soldiers and pilots; here, you’ve got songs about Napoleon and Julius Caesar. Some real deep cuts there; well done, boys!
There’s also some dicier ground stepped upon when you take a minute to actually look at what’s being sung about in some cases. It opens up when Sabaton are so committed to their LARPing and how that translates to far more brutal timeframes and contexts, on top of the celebratory power-metal tone and the connotations of the album being called Legends. Yes, someone like Genghis Khan was a ‘great’ individual in historical vernacular, but it comes with a different look when you’re bellowing that out from the perspective of a military regime famous for raping and murdering hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of people.
At the same time, you can be pretty certain that there’s no hidden meaning behind any of that. At most, they’re more plugins to fit into Sabaton’s power-metal and for them to beat their chests incessantly to. It’s nothing new for a band whose special interest is warfare, and the overblown, tongue-in-cheek power fantasy of it all is clearly closer to the point than any specifics therein. When there’s not a second of calm of dead air to be found, and Joakim Brodén makes the conscious decision to pronouncedly roll his Rs mid-caterwaul whenever possible, the vibe is as standard and recognisable as it comes.
But is it good, though? Yeah, it’s good, as much as any Sabaton album—or, indeed, power-metal as a whole—can be. Again, Legends is the work of a band deep in their comfort zone, and have long since established what works for them. It’s the sort of big, blaring, polished-to-a-sheen power-metal that’s treated as currency among the colder European nations, telegraphing every vamping moment and beat with lethal efficiency. Other than the occasional synth tone that’d threaten to gum up a less-orderly machine but are more a brief annoyance here (see the obnoxious buzz that lays stagnant atop Impaler), Legends charges on un-innovated, but also unimpeded. The choral, unreasonably massive key change on Crossing The Rubicon is the sort of ‘rule of cool’ moment that power-metal drinks up like water. Solos fly with felicitous ubiquity among the crafted, cinematic epics of instrumentals. Maybe the closest thing to ‘newness’ is Till Seger, offsetting the fact that Sabaton already have a song about Gustavus Adolphus in 2012’s The Lion From The North by having this one sung in Swedish, which makes it different enough.
Really, though, if you’re seeking out a new Sabaton album in 2025—a band who were last outside of their war-fixated wheelhouse in 2007 when were they were writing about Ghost Rider and the Nazgûl from Lord Of The Rings—you clearly don’t care about anything new. Even the more by-the-(text)books subject matter probably won’t bother you; everything else is present and accounted for. And that’s genuinely fine. Power-metal tends to get more of a pass anyway, and coupling that with Sabaton’s dogged commitment to their bit brings out enough to like and appreciate, regardless of anything else. Even when it’ll be largely forgotten in a couple of years’ time when the next one comes along (as is tradition), a prescribed dose of Sabaton that remains fun enough can be plenty justification for Legends.
For fans of: DragonForce, Powerwolf, Amaranthe
‘Legends’ by Sabaton is released on 17th October on Better Noise Music.
Words by Luke Nuttall
