(Earlier this month Metal Blade Records released the latest album from Amon Amarth, and DGR decided to share his thoughts about it — below.)

Oddly, it did not feel as if close to four years had passed for Amon Amarth between the release of 2022’s The Great Heathen Army and their latest release The Allfather Awakens. Perhaps, because somewhere along the way we finally decided in our collective subconscious to elevate Amon Amarth to both meme status and as one of the bigger metal bands out there, it has felt like they’ve been ever-present. They seemed to tour very hard behind The Great Heathen Army as well, and a decent drip-feed of singles kept the band in the limelight.

It’s easy to see why, because at this point in their career – and thirteen albums in – Amon Amarth really don’t have to work hard to establish themselves. You could pick vocalist Johan Hegg by sound out of a lineup while you had leaf blowers aimed directly at your face at this point. They’re inescapable on any metal shuffle playlist that the internet’s beloved algorithms throw at you, having found such a steady median to exist on across a few different genres. You don’t even need to describe the band by the quality of their music anymore as they’ve become one of the few that’ve codified a specific sound, spread neatly among galloping riff work and power metal adjacent guitar leads.

They’re “the Viking band”, and for a lot of people that descriptor is entry-level enough that they don’t really need to devote much thought to whether that actually means anything. Amon Amarth certainly haven’t needed to, essentially locked in place since the days of Twilight of The Thunder God. A steady mechanism of solid music with the occasional fun experiment, with only The Great Heathen Army representing a dip in quality as the band went a little too hard into medieval times cosplay territory. The course correction is even an easy one for the group, and it is one they perform on their newest album The Allfather Awakens. Continue reading »

(This is DGR’s review of Amon Amarth‘s 11th album, which was released by Metal Blade Records on May 3rd.)

Amon Amarth are fun when Amon Amarth get “weird” around the fringes of their music.

Well, let’s walk that back a bit, since there’s a lot of power in those quotation marks around weird. It’s not weird in the usual sense, as Amon Amarth remain fairly conventional, and hew pretty closely to all of the traits that make them recognizable, on their latest album Berserker. They are one of the trope vanguards of the term ‘shuffle band’, in that their music has found such a consistent bar of quality that you don’t really need to do full-album runs any more. You can throw their whole discography onto a playlist, shuffle it up, and still have a good time.

That happens to a lot of bands when they strike upon a sound that they then make their own, and Amon Amarth did that sooo long ago — about the time of Fate Of Norns and With Oden On Our Side — and since then their discography has felt like iterations upon that particular formula. Huge and epic for Twilight Of The Thundergod, surprisingly death metal for Surtur Rising, weirdly experimental on the fringes of their sound on Deceiver Of The Gods, and a big old block of a lot of the ‘same’ on the concept album – about Vikings – that was Berserker’s immediate predecessor, Jomsviking. Continue reading »