I approached this album with some trepidation. Sabaton have been an important band to me at times, but their last couple of releases have been mind-blowingly mediocre, each offering maybe two or three decent songs that you'd already heard in some form on earlier albums. Legends dropped alongside a European tour featuring Sabaton and, brace yourself, an orchestra performing Sabaton covers as support, which raises some questions about where their heads are at. Unless you're a diehard, that tour lineup is... a lot. But what about Legends itself?

Here, Sabaton follow the same tried (tired?) and true formula of stomping riffs, oversized choruses, and the occasional ripping guitar solo. This is exactly what I expected. A few songs, like the opening Powerwolf-esque "Templars" and "Hordes of Khan," managed to poke my frontal lobe, but I fell off the wagon quickly and had to force my way through the rest, resisting the urge to just put on The Art of War instead. The choruses, once one of the band's greatest strengths, are now infuriatingly bland and toothless, overloaded with choirs and cheap, saccharine pseudo-anthems that hardly suit a band singing about war. Listen to "I, Empire," "Impaler," or "The Cycle of Songs" and you'll see exactly what I mean.

That said, while Sabaton continue their downward spiral into increasingly uninspired territory, there are a few solid tracks on Legends. In addition to the opening duo, "Maid of Steel" has some punch, and I guess "The Duelist" carries a bit of power. But at this stage in their career, a handful of decent songs buried in filler simply doesn't cut it. Hard pass.