Swedish heavy metal band Sabaton has once more joined forces with Wargaming for ‘Yamato’, based on the latter’s historically accurate naval multiplayer game World Of Warships, as a new single with accompanying video available in-game.
The single is out now on all DSPs, released by Better Noise Music, the label they signed with for 2025’s Legends album, from which ‘Crossing The Rubicon’ (featuring Nothing More) became the band’s first Top 10 single on the Billboard Rock Chart.
Sabaton previously collaborated with the game developer for ‘Bismarck’. But this is the first time a Sabaton-branded Yamato is also available in World of Warships, alongside dialogue by vocalist Joakim Brodén and bassist Pär Sundström, plus a few other bespoke items in the game.
Constructed in secret and unveiled during 1941, the Yamato was a Japanese battleship. In 1945, it hit the high seas on a suicide mission to defend Okinawa. Despite ceaseless fire from aircraft above and an opposing fleet of far greater number on the water, the Yamato battled until the bitter end, when a huge explosion rendered a deathblow to the ship, sinking it.
As part of the alliance with World Of Warships and Wargaming, the band filmed a music video for the single last October in Belgrade. In it, Sabaton‘s members are seen playing even as the chaos of the vessel’s last battle, re-enacted around them, swallows them up one by one.
“Battleships are interesting and naval stories have, from time to time, been part of the Sabaton lore,” said Brodén. “‘Bismarck’ was an exciting story for us to share and a fan favourite, and ‘Yamato’ is sort of a follow-up to that song. Our former guitarist, Tommy, wrote this song while he was still in the band. We only ‘Thobbefied’ it after guitar duties were returned to Thobbe!”
“‘Bismarck’ was such an exciting song but it was never part of an album, and it felt that it was missing something. We always wanted to follow up on that story,” said bassist Pär Sundström. “Over the years, countless fans have asked us to write a song about Yamato, and we knew that would be a natural continuation of what we started with ‘Bismarck’. We knew we wanted this song to have a totally different sound, and when Tommy was writing the music for this, we felt we had the appropriate, powerful song for this story. Once again, we are collaborating with World Of Warships, and since our worlds are so close, it just feels so natural to continue this great partnership. Together, we once again created a legendary music video!”
You can stream ‘Yamato’ and check out the video at RAMzine below.
Sabaton‘s ‘Bismarck’ first arrived back in 2019, becoming one of their most popular songs, with more than 116.8 million Spotify streams to date and over 107 million views on the music video.
‘Yamato’ follows recent singles from the Legends album including ‘A Tiger Among Dragons’, inspired by Lü Bu, the “Flying General” and one of the fiercest warriors in ancient China, and ‘I, Emperor’, based on the life of Napoleon Bonaparte. Legends is available now via Better Noise Music.
