The main act (of course) on the Hammer Battalion tour was Unleashed, a band who still hold the Stockholm death metal banner high in the air, while others have fallen along the way or changed direction.
Actually, Unleashed was celebrating their 20th anniversary this year, although you could not say that time has taken its toll on this band.

Unleashed made a strong opening with The Greatest Of All Lies from their latest album Hammer Battalion and the classic track Never Ending Hate (from Shadows In The Deep), and already from the start we could see that at least the band was going to give it all they had tonight.
The crowd was well in there as well, headbanging away like there was no tomorrow, but the crowd was at the same time considerably smaller than it had been for Belphegor who played right before them. This was an odd turn of events; I have never seen something like this happen at The Rock before. Well, their loss then.

“Are you ready to do some backing vocals?!”
- Johnny Hedlund (vocals/bass)

As a test of the audience to see if they were made of the real Viking stuff, Johnny Hedlund called out to everyone to sing along to the tunes of The Immortals, a song which wasn’t even on tonight’s setlist. This is something I’ve noticed about Unleashed the few times I’ve seen them; they are very generous with adding songs to the setlist, and this is something that deserves extra credit in my book.
And it wasn’t the only added song of the evening either; they actually came back for a real encore (none of this pre-decided stuff you normally see) with the oldies The Final Silence and Before The Creation Of Time. This merited extra energy from the audience, which even saw someone get up to stage dive. He was quickly thrown of stage however, not that it mattered much as this was the plan right from the start I guess.
Also, as the evening was a call to arms in the Hammer Battalion, the title track was fittingly renamed Hammer Battalion Denmark, a title Hedlund then used throughout the song to everybody’s delight.

A strange thing about the evening, which had nothing to do with the actual concert, was that there was no merchandise stand to be found. Or at least that’s what I initially thought, for right at the very end I noticed that it had been placed up on the smokers’ balcony. Although, the manager of it was so quick in taking it down as soon as the band left the stage, there was no chance of getting to see what they had brought along. Not such a good idea if you plan on making any form of sales, which I would expect them to want to...

Setlist:

The Greatest Of All Lies
Never Ending Hate
Your Children Will Burn
This Is Our World Now
Winterland
Don’t Want To Be Born
Black Horizon
In Victory Or Defeat
Into Glory Ride
Midvinterblot
The Immortal (bonus)
Hammer Battalion
To Asgaard We Fly
Death Metal Victory
Encore:
The Final Silence
Before The Creation Of Time