Sabaton’s ‘Carolus Rex’ Certified Quadruple Platinum

Swedish metal masters Sabaton have revealed that their 2012 album, Carolus Rex, has been certified quadruple platinum in Sweden. Carolus Rex is based on the rise and fall of the Swedish Empire from 1611 to 1721, beginning with the rise of King Gustavus Adolphus – also known as the Lion from the North – and ending with the Great Northern War.

The platinum edition of the album, featuring the full album with both English and Swedish lyrics, was released on the 300^th anniversary – November 30^th – of Charles XII’s death. Charles XII was also known as Carolus Rex, and was the last king of the Swedish Empire.

Our platinum edition of Carolus Rex is out tomorrow, so we've prepared some treats. First up is part one of an exclusive three-part interview with our bass player Pär, about the story behind the album:https://t.co/kgMD8EHpM8#Platinum #Sweden #HEAVYMETAL #History #CarolusRex

— Sabaton (@sabaton) November 29, 2018

Previously, Sabaton has released English-only and Swedish-only versions of the record, but the Swedish language version was not sold in North America. The platinum version will be sold by the US branch of Sabaton’s label, Nuclear Blast.

Sabaton has also released the first of a three-part interview with Pär Sundström, Sabaton’s bassist, who describes the origin of the album.

Pär: The idea that Gustavus Adolphus had, when he was starting to expand the Swedish Empire, was to control the Baltic Sea and everything around it. This includes that he has to take parts of Germany, Russia, Baltic states, and Finland of course.

Why we decided to focus on this for an album, we have been doing a lot of different historical things over the past year since Sabaton history, from old things, to newer recent things, but we didn’t really touch Swedish history. Thankfully, Sweden has not been in war for the last 300 years, since the time of the Swedish Empire and the time of Carolus Rex.

But, this was an interesting thing for us to tell a story about our country for once and not just telling stories about every other countries around the world. The album was a big success everywhere but it speaks a little bit more to the Swedish people obviously, heh, they understand a little bit better when we sing in Swedish which is not what we usually do…

This is one of the reasons why it talks more to the Swedish people, but also why it talks to the Swedish people is, of course, it is our history, it’s the history of the Swedish people, we can somehow relate to it.

The interview with Pär is a good, but brief, introduction to the album and the part of Sweden’s history it covers, and is a must for Sabaton fans.