This is not necessarily a glamorous proposition. Glamour is what happens when somebody else pays for the champagne. Amon Amarth have spent their career drinking from the horn themselves.
The Allfather Awakens, their thirteenth studio album, is now with us and the Swedish melodic-death-metal institution are doing what it has always done: putting enormous riffs beneath stories about gods, warriors, death, fate and the various unpleasant things that happen when you live in a universe populated by Norse deities with terrible tempers.
Their debut, Once Sent from the Golden Hall, appeared in 1998 and established the basic architecture. Then came The Avenger, The Crusher, Versus the World, Fate of Norns and With Oden on Our Side—records that gradually turned the band from an underground death-metal concern into one of the great reliable engines of European metal.
Then came Twilight of the Thunder God in 2008. That was the moment the longship reached the open sea.
The title track became an anthem, the band’s melodic instincts became increasingly enormous, and Amon Amarth crossed the line between being a respected metal band and being a band that could make thousands of people simultaneously pretend to row an invisible Viking ship without anybody feeling particularly embarrassed about it.
They followed it with Surtur Rising, Deceiver of the Gods, Jomsviking, Berserker and 2022’s The Great Heathen Army. The lineup changed along the way, most notably with drummer Fredrik Andersson departing in 2015 and Jocke Wallgren eventually taking over the drum throne.
Thirty-four years into the enterprise, the band now possesses the enviable problem of having become a genre unto themselves.
So how does one go about making a viking metal album in 2026?
Rather than disappearing into a rehearsal room after a tour and emerging several months later with a stack of songs, Amon Amarth wrote much of the material between gigs. Recording then took place at Jacob Hansen’s studio in Denmark across two sessions, beginning in spring 2025 and concluding in March 2026.
More unusually, the band worked essentially one song at a time, taking each composition through drums, guitars and vocals before moving on. This sounds almost offensively sensible and logical. The result is an album constructed from individual songs rather than from some grand conceptual blueprint.
The album’s opening track “Gjallarhorn” is a very good example of why their formula continues to work as it begins with mythological grandeur and quickly becomes the sort of muscular, hook-heavy Amon Amarth number that seems specifically engineered to make a festival audience raise its fists toward the sky.
The subject is Odin’s journey to Mimir’s well in search of wisdom, and the song gives the mythology enough space to breathe without allowing the guitars to become a museum exhibit.
There are leather trousers. There are enormous beards. There are men shouting about gods while holding instruments shaped like weapons. The trick is not to eliminate the ridiculousness. The trick is to believe in it so completely that everyone else starts believing too.
“Gjallarhorn” does exactly that.
Then comes “Eight Legs of Thunder,” which takes us to Sleipnir, Odin’s eight-legged horse. This is them operating in particularly comfortable territory: heroic imagery, forward momentum and huge melodic guitar work. It is gloriously unsubtle.
And then Amon Amarth do something genuinely unexpected.
“Upphaf” is their first acoustic track. The title means “beginning,” and the song adapts the opening stanzas of the Völuspá, the prophetic poem describing the creation of the world and the ancient order of existence.
This could have been a terrible idea………….it isn’t.
Stripped of distortion and artillery-grade percussion, the band’s melodic identity remains surprisingly intact. The song reveals something that has always been hiding underneath the armour: Amon Amarth are fundamentally a melodic band.
The mythology gets the helmets and the axes but it’s the melodies that do the actual killing.
The second half opens with “Die with a War Cry,” a track that draws on the more reflective side of the Norse tradition. There is violence here, naturally. This is Amon Amarth, not a mindfulness retreat.
But the emphasis is on resolve and composure—the idea of maintaining control when everything around you is collapsing. It suits Hegg’s voice particularly well.
Beneath the growl, Hegg’s delivery has increasingly become one of the band’s defining musical characteristics: authoritative, theatrical and surprisingly human.
“Raven God” turns its attention to Huginn and Muninn, Odin’s ravens, Thought and Memory. This is an especially appropriate subject for a band now deep into its fourth decade. The ravens fly across the world and return with information for Odin. They observe. They remember. They report.
The band previously visited this territory with “Raven’s Flight” on Berserker, but “Raven God” approaches the imagery from a different angle. It is also a reminder that Odin is not merely the old man with the spear. He is the god of knowledge, sacrifice, poetry, death and cunning. He contains multitudes, as the great Bob Dylan would say.
The title track is perhaps the most revealing piece of the album’s construction.
“The Allfather Awakes” was reportedly the last song written, meaning that the song that eventually supplied the album’s title arrived after much of the record already existed. That makes the title feel less like marketing and more like a conclusion. The record’s themes—myth, memory, sacrifice, warfare and wisdom—were already there. The Allfather simply wandered in at the end and took credit.
In the end The Allfather Awakens does not attempt the youthful savagery of Once Sent from the Golden Hall or The Avenger. Nor does it appear interested in completely reproducing the death-metal aggression of The Great Heathen Army.
Instead, it sits in the territory Amon Amarth have spent years making their own: huge melodic riffs, anthemic choruses, death-metal vocals, historical and mythological storytelling, and enough studio polish to make the whole thing sound enormous.
Amon Amarth know what they are. They know what their audience wants. More importantly, they know why it works.
The Allfather Awakens is big, ridiculous, melodic, violent, sincere and enormously enjoyable. It does not apologise for being a heavy-metal album. It does not attempt to impress people who dislike heavy metal. It simply picks up the hammer, walks onto the battlefield and gets on with the job.
There are worse ways to spend an afternoon.
There are also considerably quieter ones.
But nobody ever wrote an album about those.
Donnie’s Rating: 9/10
The Allfather Awakens is out now.
