When Sabaton formed in 1999, power metal was about the dirtiest word you could utter. While most of the world was doing it for the Nookie, Gothenburg was transforming Sweden’s heavy music topography in a maelstrom of melodic death metal.
But, in time – and with a mid-2000s rebrand that saw them embracing military history – Sabaton opened the floodgates for waves of power metal-inspired bands to reshape the genre, and made the leap to arena level. With their 25th year behind them, and another arena tour scheduled for the end of this year, we cornered frontman Joakim Brodén to find out the secrets to his success…
POSTCARDS ARE NICE TO LOOK AT BUT BORING TO LIVE IN
“I grew up in Falun, a very small Swedish town. If you had a stereotype of Scandinavia with red houses, white windows and lots of snow in winter, that’s pretty much where I grew up!”
SOMETIMES YOU DON’T SEE THE HISTORY ON YOUR OWN DOORSTEP
“The biggest thing near my hometown was the World Heritage Site, Falun Mine. It was the commercial engine for the Swedish Empire in the 1600s. You’d think that might be where I got my love for history, but nope! It was just somewhere we’d visit on school trips – we didn’t realise how special it was because it was so close to home. It was like, ‘But doesn’t everyone have a mine?’”
MUSIC CAN BE LOVE AT FIRST FRIGHT
“When I was very young, maybe three or four, I remember my mom was making food and I was watching TV. Suddenly she hears me screaming. She runs in, like, ‘Is my child dying?’ and no… I was watching Twisted Sister’s I Wanna Rock video and freaking out. So she bought me the album!”
SOMETIMES HOBBIES TAKE ON A LIFE OF THEIR OWN
“Weirdly, becoming a musician was never a lifelong dream. I love music and listening to it… but I really only played Hammond organ because it was fun and we’d got one at home, and it was kind of funny to play in a metal band. It wasn’t until I was a teenager that I picked up the guitar – I was forced to play bass in the school band. I’d wanted to play keyboards, but they told me I needed to be more involved. I was just jamming with friends until I met Pär [Sundström, Sabaton bassist].”
WE LOVE POWER METAL, BUT WE ARE NOT IT
“Hammerfall are the pioneers in power metal. Possibly some of that glory belongs to Blind Guardian as well. Their late-90s and early2000s albums were so important for this scene; maybe bands like Rhapsody and Edguy too. We’ve always had a love/hate relationship with power metal. We grew up loving it and still listen to it now. We definitely have power metal influences, but the two main things in that genre are super-fast double-kick drums – which we do have at times, but not often – and high-pitched vocals… No, no, no. So describing us as a power metal band might give someone the wrong idea.”
IT’S ALL IN THE TECHNIQUE
“I swam sort of professionally when I was younger, and it’s been handy as a singer. I had an x-ray of my lungs a couple of years ago, and they were so large they didn’t fit on a single image. That was pretty funny! All that said, I still get out of breath when I run – I’ve got the capacity, just not the conditioning. I really enjoyed swimming for its social aspects and the competitive aspects. I quit in my mid-teens, but my sister continued and actually got a scholarship – she got to study in Hawaii.”
IT NEVER HURTS TO STAND OUT
“In the beginning, writing lyrics was a necessary evil. But when we wrote the music for Primo Victoria, it had a big sound, so it needed a better message than just another song about beer. We thought about D-Day. That spurred us on to write more songs about military history, and it all made sense.”
LEAN INTO YOUR NICHE
“As much as we liked it, our few fans seemed to like it even more, so we did another [album about military history], thinking we’d then move onto something else. When we made the video for Attero Dominatus, the director asked us to wear something different, and that’s where the urban camo look came in, as well as my vest. It all looked good under his lights.”
DO WHAT YOU LOVE AND YOU’LL NEVER WORK A DAY IN YOUR LIFE...
“When Sabaton were starting out, we just wrote songs for fun. The band didn’t have a singer at the time, so suggested I do it – lazy assholes still haven’t bothered to find one! When Sabaton started I was actually studying sound engineering, radio broadcasting and all that kind of stuff. I figured that’d be my path, but we had so much fun when we played that we just kept going. I never thought I’d make my living playing heavy metal.”
...BUT YOU’VE STILL GOT TO PAY THE BILLS
“I had a job on the side as well as the band for years, usually in a cycle where I would have the job up until we had a tour or something, and then I’d get fired because I had so much to do in the band. Around 2009, we were playing in Greece for the first time, and even though there weren’t many people at this show in Athens, it struck me: ‘I’ve not had another job in a long time. I guess I’m a musician!’”
MONEY TALKS
“Everybody leaving the band [in 2012] was pretty fucking worrying! Pär and I were already treating it as a career choice by that point – I had a low half-time salary for my contributions, Pär got more because he did the band full-time. The other guys had their own jobs that paid better. They felt it was better to do this as a hobby and release an album every five years, tour every two or three, but we found out that wasn’t doable for me and Pär. We offered to buy the guys out and that let us keep the band going.”
GOT A PROBLEM? GET CREATIVE WITH YOUR SOLUTIONS
“Between Sweden and Finland there’s a party cruise that happens, and we played a few. One day we were travelling over to play a show and someone pointed out it was too expensive to just go over, so we figured we’d rent the ship ourselves and play as we travelled. The Sabaton cruise was born as a solution to the problem. Sabaton Open Air was born from the idea that there were no real venues in our hometown, so maybe we could create an event where we and our friends could play. These things make it look like we’ve got our shit together, which in some ways we do, but nobody sat down on day one thinking of these ideas.”
TAKE LEAPS
“[Swedish-American actor] Peter Stormare said that when he usually gets requests to appear in music videos, bands want to come and hang out with him as the Hollywood guy. We’d just seen him in the series Hitler: The Rise Of Evil as [Ernst] Röhm, the leader of the SA [the original paramilitary wing of the Nazi party]. We got him onboard [for the music video to Uprising in 2010]. He found it funny that we were asking him to fly to Poland and dress as a Nazi! He said, ‘I can’t pass this up!’ He did it for his minimum fee, but did it because he loved the idea.”
DON’T MAKE BETS WHILE DRUNK
“I think it was [producer/Hypocrisy/Pain frontman] Peter Tägtgren’s birthday party. We had this party in a community house, and he’d got [Rainbow/Deep Purple frontman] Joe Lynn Turner singing, so we all got super-drunk. I stupidly said I could walk to our next show, but hadn’t realised how far away it was… in Norway! I got sick and couldn’t finish the last three or five days of hiking. It bugged me that I didn’t finish it, but the top priority was recovering to still play a good show.”
SOME THINGS WILL STICK WITH YOU FOREVER
“We have this song called 40:1 which is about a battle in Wizna, Poland. We played on the actual battlefield on the 90th anniversary in 2009. That was incredibly special. But also, we’ve headlined both main stages of Wacken. Starting out, even playing the festival was a dream, so to headline is unbelievable.”
Sabaton's The Legendary Tour comes to the UK in December 2025. For the full list of upcoming shows, visit the band's official website.
