Military history obsessed Swedish power metal and glam rock band Sabaton is now advertising for and having their music featured in the Belarussian massively multiplayer tank shoot-out game World of Tanks according to Blabbermouth. World of Tanks is a Russian free-to-play, usually pay-to-win game that plays like a slightly more realistic, team based version of Battlezone. Players can choose to drive hundreds of tanks from the 20th century with the ones recently added to the game that players usually have to shell out to use being slightly more powerful before being nerfed into mediocrity. The game is most popular in Eastern Europe and East Asia among teenage boys.

Sabaton and World of Tanks teaming up is a natural business move as they both share  the same target audience: fifteen year olds too young to drive who are obsessed with military hardware. World of Tanks is what kids who get bored of League of Legends anime clickfests graduate to when they can’t afford the new Call of Duty. Sabaton are what fifteen year olds who like eighties rock listening to after getting into finding out about Iron Maiden and wishing Maiden were a tamer, more emotional, and less metal as they love to sing along to Journey and Aerosmith on the local classic rock station. Perfect fit except for the fact that Sabaton sounds like German beer hall music more than heavy metal. That’s where the massive alcoholism present in the former Eastern Block comes into play. Drunk young Slavs listening to beer hall music while pretending to recreate the Battle of Kursk in their bedrooms.

What’s with the Sabaton frontman’s facial hair and armored kevlar vest though? He looks like an older George Michael wearing pads for an imaginary sport he made up that only he knows the rules to. Extreme curling? At least Deicide wore hockey pads.

Tags: glam rock, Heavy Metal, mainstream metal, nuclear blast, nuclear blast records, power metal, sabaton, sell-out, selling out, shills, video game, video game OST, world of tanks