Sabaton bassist Pär Sundström and frontman Joakim Brodén recently spoke with Guitar World about the band's difficult early years, finding their identity with the release of the  Primo Victoria in 2005, and Sabaton's rise to fame.

Sundström: "2002 and 2003 were definitely the slowest years in Sabaton’s history - it was really boring around that time. Even before that, in 1999, 2000 and 2001, the band was much more active and playing quite a lot of shows. But by 2002-2003, we were almost dead."

Brodén: "We got so angry and so determined that it made us even more focused (after the failed first album). We rehearsed even harder than before and worked on writing an even better second album, and we knew that this time we weren’t even going to give it to a record label, but would record it and finance it ourselves and then see who wanted to put it out. So without that setback of the first album, maybe Primo Victoria wouldn’t be the album that it is. We didn’t really find our musical identity until Primo Victoria. That was when things started to make sense for us musically. That was when Sabaton became Sabaton.”

Check out the complete interview here.

 

Sabaton recently released an official music video for "Seven Pillars Of Wisdom", taken from their critically acclaimed latest album, The Great War. The video was shot by Tunisian filmmaker Mehdi Jouni in the Sahara desert and features Swedish-American actor Indy Neidell, who also hosts the Sabaton History Channel. Check it out below.

The Sabaton History Channel has released Episode 046 - "Seven Pillars Of Wisdom" - T. E. Lawrence Of Arabia.

A message states: "The British T. E. Lawrence played a major role in bringing together a coalition of Arab factions to rise up against the Ottoman Empire. Their efforts helped the British War Effort in the Middle East, but the British-Arab coalition was not as stable as it might have seemed."