Amon Amarth – The Allfather Awakens (Album Review)
Updated: Oct 4
Release date: 2 October 2026
Record label: Metal Blade Records
The Riff Doctor's Score: (9/10)
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Diagnosis
Some bands borrow Viking imagery. Amon Amarth have lived and breathed it for three decades. Their most solid album since 2008’s Twilight of the Thunder God, The Allfather Awakens gallops, roars and raises its drinking horn like no one else has the right to.
Best Tracks: “Eight Legs of Thunder”, “Kvasir’s Blood”, “We Rule the Waves”, “Oden’s Hunt”
Deep Cuts: “Upphaf”, “Raven God”
The Full Review
Thirty years into their career, reinvention feels almost beside the point for Amon Amarth. Few bands have built a musical world this instantly recognisable, and fewer still can step back into it album after album without making it feel like cosplay.
The Allfather Awakens, their thirteenth studio album, does not tear up the longship blueprint. Instead, it sounds like a band completely comfortable with what they have become — bigger, sharper and still remarkably hungry.
Part of that freshness may come from a different approach behind the scenes. Rather than disappearing to write an album in one block, Amon Amarth began creating songs while touring, recording across two sessions with Jacob Hansen in Denmark. Each track was worked on and completed individually before they moved to the next, while the guitars shifted away from the more modern 5150 sound and back towards Marshall amps.
You can hear the benefits almost immediately.
“Gjallarhorn” opens the gates with huge Viking chants, but there is more happening here than scene-setting. The song follows Odin to Mimir’s well in search of wisdom, only to discover that knowledge comes at a price: “Your eye is my price” It is the sacrifice that defines the Allfather — giving up sight in one eye in exchange for a deeper kind of vision — and an image that stares back from the album artwork itself. Before the first song is over, The Allfather Awakens has already planted its central idea: wisdom, power and sacrifice rarely come separately.
Then “Eight Legs of Thunder” turns that mythology into motion. Inspired by Sleipnir, Odin’s eight-legged horse, its galloping rhythm feels almost physically connected to the story, carrying more than a little ’80s Iron Maiden in its blood. Johan Söderberg — who originally came up with the song’s main riff — and Olavi Mikkonen are on particularly fine form here, trading leads and delivering some of the finest guitar work on the entire record. If Sleipnir is doing the galloping, these two are holding the reins.
“Kvasir’s Blood” pulls back slightly from the opening charge but replaces speed with something darker. Its riffs have an almost industrial weight at times, made enormous by Hansen’s production, while the melodic guitar work keeps it unmistakably Amon Amarth. It is a subtle change of texture rather than a drop in quality.
Then the longships hit the water.
“We Rule the Waves” has been around since 2025, but sitting within the album somehow makes its enormous chorus feel even more natural. Its tale of Vikings travelling beyond familiar shores also carries an irresistible parallel with five Swedes who have spent decades taking this music around the world. And when Johan Hegg bellows “We are, we are Vikings”, you can practically see the oars hitting the water.
This is Amon Amarth. The band whose crowds are widely credited with giving metal the now-famous Viking Row at Bloodstock back in 2009. If anyone has earned the right to make thousands of people pretend they are rowing a longship in the middle of a field, it is probably them.
Around the fire
The biggest surprise arrives halfway through.
“Upphaf” is the first fully acoustic song Amon Amarth have recorded, which after more than three decades feels almost historically significant in itself. More importantly, it works because they haven't stripped away their identity to make it happen.
Built around verses adapted from the ancient Norse poem Völuspá, the song feels less like the obligatory acoustic track and more like Hegg has simply moved the story from the battlefield to the fire. His unmistakable growl becomes that of a storyteller recounting creation, ancient worlds and gods while the music remains atmospheric, melodic and unmistakably epic.
Who expected an Amon Amarth acoustic song? Probably very few. Who expected it to still sound completely like Amon Amarth? Perhaps we should have.
The peace does not last long. “Die With a War Cry” brings the axe down particularly hard, occasionally brushing against blackened territory, before “Raven God” expands things again with one of the record’s biggest choruses. The two magical ravens in Norse mythology , Huginn and Muninn, circle the song lyrically while the guitars seem to answer one another during the leads, adding another layer of drama without drowning the track in mythology for mythology’s sake.
Old gods, enormous choruses
By the time the title track arrives, The Allfather Awakens has established such a high standard that an excellent Amon Amarth song can somehow feel like one of its less remarkable moments. That is hardly criticism.
“The Allfather Awakes” brings a slightly more contemporary guitar attack, with Hegg’s vocal phrasing locking tightly into the riffs before another sizeable chorus. On another record it could easily be a standout. Here, it simply has some very noisy neighbours.
“Oden’s Hunt” certainly does it no favours.
“Hunt! Hunt! Oden’s hunt! Oden hunts tonight!”
That's basically all Amon Amarth need. It is ridiculously catchy, wonderfully uncomplicated and seemingly engineered in a Scandinavian laboratory to be shouted back by several thousand metalheads holding plastic cups of beer. Sometimes heavy metal really doesn't need to be complicated.
Finally, “Ascending Like an Eagle” stretches beyond six minutes and takes a more melodic route to the finish. Continuing the story begun on “Serpent’s Trail” from The Great Heathen Army, it trades some of the instant hooks found elsewhere for atmosphere and scale. The guitars build a huge melodic backdrop as the song gradually climbs towards an appropriately epic conclusion.
By that point, melodic death metal and Viking metal have become almost impossible to separate. Amon Amarth have spent too long welding the two together.
There is no reinvention here, and there doesn't need to be. Across ten songs, The Allfather Awakens barely puts a foot wrong — and when the bar is this high, even its lesser moments arrive swinging an axe.
Thirty years on, nobody rows these waters quite like them.
Jose Crespo for The Riff Collective
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