Amon Amarth released The Pursuit of Vikings: 25 Years in the Eye of the Storm on November 16, 2018. The live album and documentary package put their first 25 years alongside two very different performances from Germany’s Summer Breeze festival in 2017. One set reached into the back catalogue; the other used the band’s full stage production, complete with a giant sea serpent and pyrotechnics.
The official live video for “Raise Your Horns” comes from the main-stage performance. Released ahead of the package, the clip offered a look at the concert footage that accompanied the band’s account of how they got there.
The project began with a desire to make another live DVD. Guitarist Johan Söderberg told Distorted Sound in an interview published in November 2018 that the band wanted to add something beyond the shows, which led to a documentary about their formation and development. Producer Alexander Milas and director Phil Wallis helped build that history into a film running just over 102 minutes. The filming process extended well beyond a few backstage interviews: Söderberg said the crew followed them for two years, both on tour and at home in Sweden. He remembered their presence as unobtrusive, allowing the musicians to get comfortable with the cameras.
For vocalist Johan Hegg, the point was to show the people inside Amon Amarth as well as the band’s progress. “We wanted it to be honest and straightforward,” he told Full Metal Jackie in an interview published by Loudwire in January 2019. He emphasized that they were an active band whose members were on good terms, looking back while they were still working together. Seeing photographs and footage from the earliest club shows made that progression feel strange even to him: the performers had changed considerably, but they were the same people.
The Summer Breeze recordings gave that history room in the set lists. At Flugplatz Dinkelsbühl-Sinbronn, the festival site in Dinkelsbühl, Germany, Amon Amarth played the smaller T-Stage on August 16, 2017, then headlined the main stage the following night. The first performance’s 14 songs included “The Last with Pagan Blood” and “For the Stabwounds in Our Backs.” That selection put older material at the centre of a show filmed alongside the larger headline production.
Revisiting those songs was easier than choosing them. Söderberg said familiar parts returned after a few listens because the band had played the material so often on earlier tours. Finding space for it in an ordinary touring set was another matter. He explained that they tried occasional unexpected selections, but audiences on an album tour often responded more strongly to newer songs and established favourites.
The main-stage performance opened with “The Pursuit of Vikings” and stretched across 16 songs. The original CD/DVD package preserved that show on CD, with both concerts and the documentary on its two DVDs. It let listeners follow the headline set on its own while keeping the broader retrospective together on film.
One song connected the two concert programmes in a particularly clear way. “Twilight of the Thunder God” opened the T-Stage show and closed the main-stage set, giving the same song opposite jobs on successive nights.
