Fimbul Winter Has Come; Ex-Amon Amarth Players Call EP ‘Best Thing’ They’ve Recorded
“It’s much heavier than the stuff we did in the past. Yeah, it’s very brutal, but it’s also mellow and melodic. I love it. I haven’t listened to any other band since we recorded this, because it’s so amazing. It’s the best thing I’ve ever recorded.”
-former Amon Amarth and current Fimbul Winter drummer Niko Kaukinen.
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Fans of Scandinavian melodic death metal are notoriously persnickety. That’s particularly the case when it comes to evaluating whether a band in the narrow yet revered sub-subgenre has “sold out” over the years. The criterion is pretty straightforward: Has the band strayed from the raw, grisly production sound that characterized the first recordings by In Flames, Dissection, At the Gates, Dark Tranquillity and Dismember in favor of a more polished or – gasp! – mainstream sensibility.
If you consider yourself a devotee of MDM from the aforementioned locale in northern Europe, you may have noticed a key contributor to the rise of the subgenre missing from the last sentence: Amon Amarth. While perhaps more singularly responsible than another other Scandinavian death-metal act for getting Americans and others hooked on meth – oops, we mean melodeth – they, like many of the other progenitors, have taken a licking and even faced threats of getting exiled from the community they helped cultivate in the first place.
With that in mind, a new band named Fimbul Winter is here to deliver fresh songs that hearken back to the earlier sound of Amon Amarth, much like the Halo Effect is doing for those longing for what many consider to be the peak albeit bygone era of In Flames. Also similar to the Halo Effect, Fimbul Winter have cemented their legitimacy and ensured they’re not merely a bunch of wannabes by featuring some of the most important musicians that Amon Amarth has counted in its ranks over the past three-plus decades.
They include founding members Anders Biazzi and Niko Kaukinen, who play guitar and drums, respectively, for Fimbul Winter; and another ex-Amon Amarth member, Fimbul Winter’s lead guitarist Fredrik Andersson (who recently shared with us a poignant memory of recently deceased At the Gates frontman Tomas Lindberg). Rounding out Fimbul Winter’s lineup is vocalist Clint Williams of Munitions note. The Bad Penny caught up with the majority of Fimbul Winter’s lineup last month, ahead of the band releasing its five-song debut EP, What Once Was, on Friday.
Hey guys. Congrats on the new band and the rad EP, and thanks for chatting with me today. So, if I have this straight, Niko departed from the Amon Amarth fold in 1996, Anders left in 1998, and Fredrik split in 2015. Have you all stayed in touch more or less consistently over the years, in the lead-up to the formation of Fimbul Winter?
Fredrik: No, in the past 10 years, we haven’t had any contact. Niko and Anders played together in Amon Amarth during some of the same years [Niko on drums from 1992 to 1996 and Anders on rhythm guitar from 1992 to 1998,] so it can get confusing.
What sparked the idea for creating this band, then?
Fredrik: The original plan [materialized] because Niko had a birthday party where he was gonna play with his other band, Stockholm United [SthlmUtd], which is a punk band. We were out drinking one night, and he just said that he wanted to play these old demo songs of him in Amon Amarth that he recorded back in ’93. I said, “Well, I could play the guitar. Let’s do it … it sounds like fun.” Then we asked Anders, and eventually he joined in. We did that show and played those songs and realized we had so much fun jamming together in the rehearsal room, we figured we would keep doing that. That’s how this incarnation started.
So Niko, had you kept those demos from ’93 tucked away or did you revisit them every once in a while, to listen to them again?
Niko: No. I didn’t play death metal for 27 years after I left Amon Amarth. This was just a fun thing to do for my 50th birthday.
What was the reception like when you played them at the party?
Niko: Well, only friends were invited, and they obviously liked it and had fun. But we did one more show on a metal cruise a couple of weeks later, and the reception there was pretty cool as well.
Are you currently lining up dates for a tour?
Niko: Not a tour per se, but we have a couple of select shows in the pipeline for next year. We’re gonna do a couple of festivals to begin with.
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“We wanted to stay away from the [larger-than-life] elements of [Amon Amarth], like the onstage theatrics that Amon Amarth brings to their shows nowadays. We don’t need ships. The music is the most important thing.”
–former Amon Amarth guitarist and current Fimbul Winter guitarist Anders Biazzi
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Are all five of the songs on the EP from those demos or are there a couple of new ones?
Fredrik: The demo that we talked about, that’s the Amon Amarth demo from 1990 [called The Arrival of the Fimbul Winter and self-released in 1994]. There were three songs on it [“Burning Creation,” “The Arrival of the Fimbul Winter” and “Without Fear”], and they’re in the past. The songs [on What Once Was] are new; we wrote those five songs [“Storms Rage,” “What Once Was,” “Mounds of Stones,” “A Soul That Soared” and “In Solitude’s Embrace”] in the last couple of years.
What was your vision for the five new songs?
Fredrik: Niko and Anders are founding members of Amon Amarth, and I was in the band for 17 years. [Vocalist Johan Hegg] likes to think that it’s his band, but it’s also our band. It’s been part of my life for 17 years. The music that I write and the music that I want to hear is what we are doing right now. Yeah, there are similarities with old Amon Amarth, but not so much new Amon Amarth. It’s not a copy. It’s something fresh and new and a work between me, Niko and Anders, since we wrote all the songs.
Niko, how would you describe the new material?
Niko: It’s much heavier than the stuff we did in the past. Yeah, it’s very brutal, but it’s also mellow and melodic. I love it. I haven’t listened to any other band since we recorded this, because it’s so amazing. It’s the best thing I’ve ever recorded.
How long did it take to create the EP, from start to finish?
Anders: We started in late 2023, so almost two years. But that was with a lot of space in between for life and families and everything that comes in between. There were big, huge gaps. The actual songs came about pretty quickly. We just gathered all our riffs, and Anders put it together in a matter of weeks, basically. Then we started recording in March or April.
The sound has, in some ways, stayed consistent from what the first original Amon Amarth was: four or five members created the band as a unit. So to say that it’s one person’s project seems a little bit untrue, I would say. I agree to some extent, but … [Hegg] is running Amon Amarth’s camp, so I understand his point of view absolutely. But maybe he doesn’t understand how big an impact the music and what it means for us has [affected us] as well.
Would you say the band has changed in a fundamental way over the years?
Fredrik: I think so. I first heard the band when they opened a show for Dissection in ’93 or ’94. I started talking to the guys – we hung out at parties – and I really loved the demo too. When I got asked to join later on, in ’98 they were working on their second full-length album. When I heard the material for that, I actually thought, “Wow, this is something completely different. It’s not the same band that I knew or what I wanted the band to be.”
Is it fair to say that Amon Amarth transformed into more of a melodic death-metal band following “Death in Fire”?
Anders: I didn’t agree with that transition. I wanted us to always be heavier and move back toward the heavier and old-school stuff.
Which explains why Fimbul Winter’s debut has a heavier, grittier sound, correct?
Anders: Yeah, and we also wanted to stay away from the [larger-than-life] elements of the band, like the onstage theatrics that Amon Amarth brings to their shows nowadays. We don’t need ships. The music is the most important thing.
Last question: Are you thinking of creating a full-length?
Niko: Yeah, we’ve already started writing new music already. We’re really excited about what we’re creating with this new project.
Snag a copy of Fimbul Winter’s What Once Was EP on their Bandcamp page, and keep up with them on Facebook and Instagram.
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