Heroes of the Great War

At this point, Sabaton have become the equivalent of a FIFA or 2K Sports videogame whereby they release a new thing every year, and it's literally all the same except they added one little feature which manages to make hordes of people buy these games because "muh new feature!". Sabaton is a band that has always been more famous for their concept as a band rather than as a band itself, because they're the band that sings about war and stuff, and through their rise to fame they managed to expand further beyond the world of music, by having themselves be associated and appear in videogames, well-produced YouTube series of mini-documentaries, and even movies now; this is all content consumed by millions of people and which make the band have an incredible reach, even to people who don't necessarily like metal.

Now, we begin this new year of 2023 with Sabaton releasing "Heroes of the Great War", an EP with a title that convinces me that Sabaton probably just draws all names for songs and albums, as well as for their lyrics, from a pool of words. Like, dude, this is just literally the title of two of their albums put together. The EP is nothing short of unnecessary and an outright cashgrab to make armchair pseudo-historians orgasm to the sound of just ONE new Sabaton song with lyrics more generic than a Google Play Store videogame, and a selection of 6 songs from their latest three albums, all of them focusing on individuals, in order to make this weird sort of "concept EP" which has no reason to exist and is just the equivalent to a Spotify playlist officialized by the band.

Sabaton's latest track, The New Soldier, is yet another weak attempt at making some sort of epic, symphonic power metal song, but what we get instead is a cheesy, mid-tempo, synth-driven, major scale copy-of-a-copy-of-a-copy of whatever song Sabaton made 10 years ago, just worsened a hundred times. It opens up with a horrendous synth which keeps going throughout the rest of the song, with most of the guitar work focusing on power chords and palm-muted progressions with the exact same rhythm patterns any other Sabaton song has, it even has the same stop right before the chorus I've heard in like a dozen songs by the band in the past... ah... the chorus... it's the most boring chorus I've heard, it's practically just one chord repeated for 3 beats, with a switch in the last beat which works as a continuation which adds tension and then one which results in some sort of relieving, "epic" outcome. The only instrument that gives this monotonous chorus a bit of color is the synth, which plays in the background, and then again, the synth effect is terrible.

The rest of the songs are massively better than that; it's just incredible how Sabaton have become increasingly worse at writing songs throughout the years, if they even still write their stuff and it's not just AI-generated tabs manufactured by some state-of-the-art SabatonAI which is capable of just doing all the job for the band members while they relax in the piling amounts of cash they've now made from selling their mediocre products to the millions of people that don't know the existence of bands such as 1914... Ok, I got a bit off-track there. The only songs that actually aren't (too) terrible here are A Ghost in the Trenches, Last Dying Breath, and Seven Pillars of Wisdom. These tracks are somewhat mediocre but they've got nice riffs with faster tempos and they're catchy, while 82nd All the Way is a bit too cheesy for my taste, and the other two songs come from the band's newest full-length, which I find disastrous.

Sabaton have just become some sort of a meme at this point, with the question being whether they're self-aware or not. In the words of Propagandhi's Chris Hannah, music for them is just a bank machine by now, so I'm not really surprised when they release this kind of blatant trash that has literally no point other than to keep the band's name in everyone's mouth. It's certainly disappointing to see a band that you once liked a lot become some sort of brand name used only to farm money by releasing barely or non-enjoyable songs for the fans that are clearly no longer people like you, but rather a massive mainstream of people with the most surface-level musical taste. This is basically the definition of selling out.