Erik Grönwall Trivia — 100 Entries
100 sourced facts about Erik Grönwall.
Trivia
The Japanese edition of Bad Bones carries a bonus track not on the international release: "Life Goes On". It was issued by King Records as KICP-4115 and went on sale in Japan on 22 May 2026, the same day as the worldwide release.
Ahead of the Japanese dates, the promoter Udo Artists ran two open calls for fans: questions for Grönwall between 22 and 28 July, and song requests between 4 and 10 August. The song call was deliberately wide — his own material, songs he had performed before, songs he had covered, or songs he had never sung at all — with the selected requests to be sung by Grönwall himself. On 21 August the first part of a special interview went up.
On 22 May 2023 Skid Row announced that their first Japanese tour in over a decade would have to be rescheduled, two days after scrapping the remaining dates of their Australian run. The reason was Grönwall's continuing flu-like symptoms. The band said tickets already bought would be honoured for the new dates and that they were working to reschedule as quickly as possible.
The Japanese dates that were called off had been announced on 15 February 2023: 24 May at COOL JAPAN PARK OSAKA WW Hall in Osaka and 26 May at Tokyo Dome City Hall, both with doors at 18:00 and stage time at 19:00, promoted by Udo Artists. It would have been the band's first visit since taking on Grönwall and releasing their first album in sixteen years — and it never happened on those dates.
After the Japanese shows fell through, Grönwall closed a vlog on his own YouTube channel with an apology to the fans in Australia and Japan: he had done his best, he said, but this time he had to be honest with himself and put his health first. He put the illness down to the fatigue of crossing time zones back to back — Sweden to California, a show in California, then a flight to Sydney and on to Brisbane.
In November 2026 Grönwall tours Japan under his own name for the first time: 4 November at The Garden Hall in Ebisu, Tokyo and 5 November at Umeda Club Quattro in Osaka, both with doors at 18:00 and stage time at 19:00, standing tickets at 9,500 yen including tax with a drink charge on top. Udo Premium Members had first refusal from 23 May, ordinary members from 25 May, and general sale opened on 13 June.
The tour is a quick return: Grönwall had been in Japan in January 2026 singing on Michael Schenker's Japanese dates. Japanese music media framed the solo shows as a homecoming of sorts, arriving after the Skid Row visit that never happened in 2023 and the reception he got on the Schenker tour.
Grönwall's own website dates his arrival to Swedish prime-time television in 2009, and singles out the performance of Iron Maiden's "Run To The Hills" as the moment itself: not merely another turn on a talent show, but the introduction of one of the strongest rock voices ever to come out of Sweden.
Winning Idol gave Grönwall a solo debut, and in 2010 he took a different road and joined the Swedish hard rock band H.E.A.T. His own website treats that decision as the proof that he was neither a product nor a puppet with someone else pulling the strings, but a man who chose to build a career on his own terms.
In April 2018 Grönwall made his American debut in front of roughly ten million viewers, playing Simon Zealotes in NBC's live broadcast of Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice's Jesus Christ Superstar. The cast around him included John Legend, Alice Cooper and Sara Bareilles.
The album of Jesus Christ Superstar Live in Concert was nominated for Best Musical Theater Album at the Grammy Awards, and the nomination extended to the vocalists who sang on the recording. Grönwall's name stands in that list alongside John Legend, Sara Bareilles, Alice Cooper, Ben Daniels, Brandon Victor Dixon, Jin Ha, Norm Lewis and Jason Tam.
The news of the Grammy nomination reached Grönwall as he came off stage in Barcelona with H.E.A.T. He said afterwards that not grasping how big the production had been probably helped him, and described the whole thing as an enormous thing to take hold of for a small-town guy from Knivsta.
Grönwall's official site tells the story of the offer this way: years earlier he had toured the UK with H.E.A.T as Skid Row's opening act, and night after night his performances stuck with the band — with Rachel Bolan in particular. So when Skid Row went looking for a new singer in 2022, it was Bolan who got in touch and asked him whether he wanted to join.
Of his partnership with Jona Tee, Grönwall has said that carrying on together felt entirely natural. The two had toured most of the world and released music together for a decade, and he describes Tee as being like a brother by blood.
The YouTube channel he started while recovering grew into one of the pillars of his career. His official site describes something that began as a private way of reconnecting with music and turned into a global audience, drawn in by his readings of rock classics — many of them following his path through illness, recovery and back to the stage. Singing, as the site puts it, became both therapy and a connection to the world.
The Japanese edition credits list the players on Bad Bones as Grönwall on lead and backing vocals, Fredrik Thomander on guitar, bass and backing vocals, Philip Näslund on guitar, Pedro Moya on drums and Jona Tee on keyboards, among others. Thomander produced, Erik Mårtensson mixed, and Svante Forsback mastered the record at Chartmakers.
For Bad Bones, Grönwall reunited with two collaborators: Jona Tee, his old H.E.A.T bandmate, and the producer Fredrik Thomander, who has also worked on Nestor's material. His official site treats that reunion as the point where he began building the songs that would define the next stage of his career.
Grönwall was 21 when he won the Swedish television talent contest Idol in 2009, and it was his second attempt — he had tried out for the same programme two years earlier. The material he picked that year was hard rock almost throughout: Skid Row's "18 And Life", Kiss's "Shout It Out Loud", Iron Maiden's "Run To The Hills" and Queen's "The Show Must Go On".
Immediately after his recruitment was made public, Grönwall told SiriusXM that he had grown up listening to Skid Row and that Sebastian Bach's voice was one of the reasons he started singing at all. That, he said, is why he reached for "18 And Life" once he had a place on Idol — and why he regards that song as the one that handed him a career.
When Grönwall appeared as a guest on the Swedish morning programme Nyhetsmorgon in 2022, the show dug out and broadcast the footage of him singing "18 And Life" on Idol thirteen years earlier — just after he had become the official singer of the band that wrote it.
Four H.E.A.T studio albums carry Grönwall's voice: Address The Nation (2012), Tearing Down The Walls (2014), Into The Great Unknown (2017) and H.E.A.T II (2020). Those four records are the studio account of his decade in the band.
In October 2020 H.E.A.T announced Grönwall's departure and, in the same breath, the return of their original singer Kenny Leckremo. The band's founding members used their statement to thank Grönwall for ten years of travelling the world and for building the band into what it had become; Leckremo, for his part, described his return as a shot at redemption.
Grönwall's own farewell to H.E.A.T said that the band had been the place where he grew as a person, as a singer and as a frontman. They had taken on a young guy fresh off Swedish Idol, he said, and believed in his potential more than he believed in it himself — something he said he would always be grateful for.
Grönwall was diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukaemia in March 2021. Not long afterwards he wrote on social media that he felt privileged to live in an age when the disease is curable, that his body was responding well to treatment, and that the treatment would be long — the toughest challenge of his life so far, for him and for his family.
The date Grönwall counts as the start of his second life is 12 August 2021, the day of his bone marrow transplant. On the fifth anniversary in August 2026 he marked it as a fifth birthday, writing that it had given him new blood, a new immune system and a new life.
In the post marking five years since the transplant, Grönwall named four things that made his survival possible: an anonymous donor, the Swedish healthcare system, science, and Tobiasregistret — the organisation that made the procedure happen at all.
At the time of the transplant the donor was entirely anonymous. In a January 2022 interview Grönwall described a stranger somewhere in the world giving him a second chance at life — a person with no connection to him at all, who did not even know whose body the cells were destined for.
The anonymity did not last. In an August 2026 post Grönwall revealed that he and the donor had both agreed to lift it, that he now knows who his blood brother is and that the two stay in touch. They have never met in person, he wrote, but he counts the man as family — and will not publish his name, out of respect for his privacy.
Speaking at the end of 2022 about the twelve-month examination that follows a transplant, Grönwall reported that the results had come back showing one hundred per cent healthy cells in his body.
The treatment rebuilt Grönwall's body in a literal sense. He came out of it with a new immune system and even a different blood type, which meant every vaccination had to be done over again. He has compared that new immune system to a small child bringing home every virus going round the nursery.
Watching people hurry to work from his hospital window, Grönwall says he found himself asking what everyone was rushing towards. What came to mind was Bushido, the code the samurai lived by. Deciding that he needed a code of his own, he drew one up there in hospital, and the item he placed at the top of it was health first.
In December 2023 Grönwall posted two photographs side by side: one taken two years earlier at the height of his illness, one recent. In the text he said he would not wish cancer on anyone, but that he was grateful for what the fight had given him and was happier than he had been before it happened — because at 36 he had learned, in practice, how scarce a resource time is.
Skid Row had their eye on Grönwall long before he joined. Bassist Rachel Bolan has said that during the 2018 tour on which H.E.A.T supported them he listened to the Swede sing from the dressing room every night, and went out behind the monitors more than once to watch. He got as far as thinking about contacting Grönwall for a side project during Skid Row's downtime.
Guitarist Dave 'Snake' Sabo has recalled that when the situation with ZP Theart reached the point of needing a decision, the name that surfaced was Grönwall's. Years later a friend, Rob Hoffman, told him there was a guy in Sweden if anything ever happened — the same thing, Sabo noticed, that the band's manager had said years before.
On 23 March 2022 Skid Row announced in a single stroke that they had parted ways with ZP Theart and taken on the former H.E.A.T frontman Erik Grönwall. Their statement called it a new era for the band: a new album, a new single, a world tour and a new voice. Grönwall had in fact joined that January, and Theart had played his last show with the band in February.
The offer was made without the two sides ever having met. Grönwall has said it was a big risk for the band to ask a singer they had never been in a room with — though when he put that to Rachel Bolan, the bassist pointed out that Grönwall had taken that risk four times over, once for each of the members already in the band.
His frame of mind going in was oddly level-headed. It was an opportunity nobody could turn down, he reasoned, and if it did not work out — if they did not like him or he did not like them — he would at least have been the singer of Skid Row for a week or two, and nobody could take that away. As it turned out, the two sides clicked straight away.
Joining the band moved his comeback forward. Grönwall had another show booked for June 2022 and had planned on four months to get back into shape; Skid Row gave him one. He started rehearsing at the end of February, went to his vocal coach and did everything else the deadline demanded, and made the Las Vegas date at the end of March.
Facing his first stage in two years, Grönwall has said that scared is the right word for how he felt. He did not know how his body would react after the treatments, and he had not finished processing the sheer turn the story had taken — from leukaemia to the front of Skid Row.
Skid Row's first night with Grönwall was 26 March 2022 at the Zappos Theater inside Planet Hollywood in Las Vegas, supporting Scorpions on the rescheduled dates of their Sin City Nights residency. The set ran to nine songs and included "The Gang's All Here", the new single that had gone out the day before.
On stage in Las Vegas, Grönwall asked the crowd whether they had any idea what it felt like to sing the song that started his career with the band that wrote it — meaning "18 And Life". Someone later commented asking whether he had just quoted the script of Rock Star, the film in which an ordinary young man is plucked out to front his favourite metal band.
The first four months went by at a blur. In a summer 2022 interview Grönwall counted around thirty shows, one album recorded, work started on another, and a music video shot — all in that time. It felt as though he had been in the band for two years, he said, when in fact it had been four months.
Asked what carried him through the illness, Grönwall points to his wife. When he was ready to give up during the treatments, he says, she was the one who refused to let him — and she was tough about it. He also had a two-and-a-half-year-old son at home at the time, and coming back from hospital and seeing the boy was, by his own account, his weak spot.
Announced in the same breath as the new singer was The Gang's All Here, Skid Row's first studio album in sixteen years, set for 14 October 2022 on earMUSIC. The title track went out as a single on 25 March, and a snippet of it had its world premiere on the day of the announcement on SiriusXM's Trunk Nation With Eddie Trunk.
Most of The Gang's All Here was cut in Nashville, Tennessee with producer Nick Raskulinecz, whose previous credits include Foo Fighters, Rush, Alice In Chains, Halestorm, Evanescence and Stone Sour.
The illness changed how Grönwall works in the studio. He has described finding a kind of aggression in it — he hates what he went through, but it made him stronger, and he now goes into a vocal take determined to make it count. When he is recording, he says, that take is the only thing that exists, and he gives it everything until he cannot do it any more.
Grönwall had no hand in writing The Gang's All Here. Speaking in 2026 he said that when the band sent him the songs they sounded like the Skid Row he had grown up listening to, and that he loves the record.
Grönwall's singing has a clear set of models behind it. He names Bon Scott, Sebastian Bach and Robert Plant as the voices he was trying to sound like when he started out, and says he played Skid Row's Slave To The Grind over and over precisely because he wanted to sing like Bach.
Grönwall is straightforward about the fans who prefer an original line-up. As a fan himself, he says, there are bands he wants to hear with the original members, so he understands the position completely — while still holding that what he and Skid Row had together was a genuinely good thing.
In May 2023, midway through an Australian tour, Grönwall came down with flu-like symptoms. The Brisbane show was scrapped; the Sydney show on 19 May went ahead. One song in — after "Slave To The Grind" — he realised it was not going to work, stopped, talked it over with the band in the dressing room, and then went back out and finished the show anyway.
The same thing happened again in September 2023. Grönwall played a good show at The Wellmont Theater in Montclair, New Jersey on 8 September, went to bed, and woke up with no voice at all — he could not even warm up, and although the band held out until the last minute the shows had to move. The third North American leg with Buckcherry was pushed into the following year, and two other dates to late September.
Explaining that postponement, Grönwall laid out the arithmetic of his own body: two years since the transplant, an immune system that was therefore two years old, and a long way still to go in rebuilding its resistance. Going out on tour with Skid Row six months after a transplant and chemotherapy, he pointed out, is not exactly standard practice.
On 27 March 2024 Grönwall announced on his own social media that he was leaving Skid Row, because prioritising his health and full recovery had proved difficult while fronting the band. The 2021 treatment, he wrote, had given him a superpower called perspective, and he had used it to write down the values he meant to live by. Health first sits at the top of that list, and over the previous year he had looked at it many times before admitting that he was not living by it.
In the statement Grönwall went out of his way to rule out two readings: he was not ill, and he had not gone off touring — he loves being on the road, and the two sides had genuinely tried to find a balance together. He simply concluded that stepping aside was better for him. He loved Skid Row, the statement said, but he loved and respected his health more.
Skid Row put out their own statement the same day, saying they were proud of what they had created and accomplished with Grönwall over the previous two years and wishing him and his health nothing but the best. The band added that they would soon be announcing a live album capturing that period of their history.
Two months after Grönwall's exit, Halestorm's Lzzy Hale took over lead vocals for four Skid Row shows in North America, running from 17 May to 1 June 2024 through Illinois, Iowa, Nevada and California.
The conversation about how much to tour had begun two years before the split. In a 2024 video message Grönwall said he first raised the question of a better balance in 2022 — this was not something he had woken up and decided the day before, but something he had been weighing for a long time.
Grönwall's proposal to the band was specific: three weeks on the road including travel, then a month off, and repeat. It was never about not touring at all, he has said more than once — he wanted the gaps in between to recover. The band did not consider that workable, and no agreement was reached.
Grönwall frames the decision as a promise kept to himself. He left, he says, to respect the person who went through the leukaemia — the man in that hospital bed — and the values he had set down there. He had promised himself he would always put his health first, and when he felt he could not do that inside the band there was only one decision left. Had it been an option, he says, he would have stayed.
Looking back on the relationship, Grönwall says he was never treated as the hired hand. It was democratic from day one and he was part of the band, not an employee. Both sides had taken a real risk on each other, he reckons, and both had added something — it was, in his summary, a genuinely good thing.
The band's side of it is on the record too. In a 2024 interview guitarist Dave 'Snake' Sabo described how Grönwall, newly in remission and getting his energy back, immediately wanted to sing again; how the band called him up and asked him to sing on the record they had just made; how it became clear early in the touring that his health was not there yet; and how, after talking to his doctors and his family, they could not make it work either medically for him or economically for the band.
The document of Grönwall's time in the band turned out to be Live In London, Skid Row's first official live album and concert film, recorded at the O2 Forum Kentish Town on 24 October 2022 and released by earMUSIC on 20 September 2024 as a double LP and a CD/DVD digipack. Given Grönwall's health and where the band ended up, Sabo has said, he is thankful they captured it when they did.
Two years on, in 2026, Grönwall described where things stand with his former bandmates: he has texted a little with the guitarist Snake, whom he misses, and has not really spoken to anyone else. They had a good thing going, he said, and it felt as though it ended too fast.
The guitarist who picked Grönwall up after Skid Row was Michael Schenker. On Schenker's 2024 album My Years With UFO he sings the UFO song "Mother Mary", a track that also carries a guest guitar appearance by Guns N' Roses' Slash, and which was issued as the album's first single on 19 June 2024.
My Years With UFO marked fifty years since Schenker's 1972–78 stint in UFO, revisiting eleven songs from that era with a long list of guest singers and players. Axl Rose, Slash, Kai Hansen, Roger Glover, Joey Tempest, Biff Byford, Jeff Scott Soto, John Norum, Dee Snider and Joe Lynn Turner are all on it — and so is Grönwall.
Grönwall's first night on stage with Michael Schenker was 9 April 2025 at De Boerderij in Zoetermeer, the Netherlands, opening the guitarist's spring European tour behind My Years With UFO. The set was built from the UFO era — "Natural Thing", "Only You Can Rock Me", "Hot 'N' Ready", "Doctor Doctor" and the rest.
On 4 May 2025 Grönwall left Schenker's European tour and flew home to Sweden. Twenty minutes before the Vienna show on 17 April he had taken a call from his family: his father had been rushed to hospital by ambulance, unable to stand on his left leg, and heart surgery had since been decided on. Grönwall missed the Madrid and Barcelona dates, with Roberto Dimitri Liapakis covering for him. He needed to show up not as a performer but as a son, he wrote.
On 23 May 2025 Grönwall joined H.E.A.T on stage at La Riviera in Madrid for three songs — "Breaking The Silence", "Inferno" and "Living On The Run". The show happened to be the one being professionally filmed for a future DVD and Blu-ray release, and it was his first appearance with the band in four and a half years.
The work with Michael Schenker did not stop at one song. In August 2024 Schenker revealed in an interview that his next Michael Schenker Group album, Don't Sell Your Soul, would have Grönwall singing most of the material. It was one of three records the guitarist had written and begun in the studio from June 2023.
Don't Sell Your Soul came out on 3 October 2025 via earMUSIC, and was announced from the stage at Wacken Open Air that summer: on 31 July Schenker closed his set with a world-exclusive live premiere of the title track. Grönwall sings lead, with guest vocal appearances from Robin McAuley, Roberto Dimitri Liapakis and Michael Voss.
Grönwall first mentioned the Schenker tour on his own YouTube livestream of 20 September 2024, saying he would be heading out around Europe the following year, that he had sung a song on My Years With UFO, and that he had been looking forward to getting back on that stage again.
What made touring with Schenker possible was a different set of terms. When Grönwall explained his medical history, he says, the guitarist told him not to worry: he would have a stand-in singer ready in case Grönwall had to sit one out. That, he says, is what made him comfortable trying the road again — Schenker, in his words, is very good at finding solutions.
On what Schenker is like to be around, Grönwall calls him the most straightforward person he has met — a man who tells you exactly what he wants. He recalls a flight to Japan on which everyone was wrecked by jet lag except Schenker, who announced that he likes jet lag, because it means he does not have to sleep and can get more done.
The first thing Grönwall did after H.E.A.T was to team up with another H.E.A.T alumnus, the keyboard player and songwriter Jona Tee. Their power metal project New Horizon released its debut album Gate Of The Gods on 11 March 2022 through Frontiers Music Srl on CD, vinyl and digital.
New Horizon began as a project meant to feature several different lead singers. What changed it was Grönwall turning up at the studio to record two songs: the material Tee had written suited his voice alarmingly well, and by the time those two tracks were finished the pair were already sketching out a future together. The project was reshaped into something with the feel of a band.
Gate Of The Gods drew a spread of guests: Robban Bäck of Mustasch, Sam Totman of DragonForce, Love Magnusson of Dynazty, Dave Dalone of H.E.A.T, Niko Vuorela of Temple Balls and Laucha Figueroa.
On 23 April 2023 Grönwall marked passing 40,000 YouTube subscribers with a livestream: a two-part interview plus an acoustic set of covers — Bob Seger's "Old Time Rock & Roll", Deep Purple's "Child In Time", 4 Non Blondes' "What's Up" and Creedence Clearwater Revival's "Travelin' Band" — with H.E.A.T guitarist Dave Dalone alongside him.
In 2023 Grönwall put out a newly recorded version of Iron Maiden's "Run To The Hills", saying it felt like time to revisit a classic he had performed live on Swedish Idol back in 2009. Philip Näslund played everything except bass, Ricky Bonazza played bass, and Jakob Jakobsson Blom shot the video.
The cover of Bon Jovi's "Livin' On A Prayer" that appeared in September 2023 was produced by Jona Tee, who also played every instrument on the recording — his old H.E.A.T bandmate working behind the scenes on the covers as well.
After joining Skid Row, Grönwall once sorted the fans into three kinds. Following a show in California, someone came up to him afterwards and told him — addressing him as Sebastian — that he had still got it. There are fans who think Sebastian Bach is still in the band, he noted, and fans who know the whole story.
On the calls for the classic line-up, Grönwall admitted that he is a Bon Scott man himself when it comes to AC/DC, so he understands the impulse completely. What struck him, he said, was the privilege of having so many people talking and arguing about the band at all — something a lot of bands would kill for.
Eriksplanations collects the covers that took off on Grönwall's YouTube channel, issued as a limited signed vinyl. Volume 1 came out in 2023, sold out in under a month, and then appeared on the digital platforms. Its contents include "Rainbow In The Dark", "Headless Cross", "Hallowed Be Thy Name", "Love Gun", "Chandelier" and "Separate Ways".
Eriksplanations Vol. 2 arrived in March 2025, gathering the covers uploaded to the channel over the previous couple of years: Judas Priest's "Painkiller", Mötley Crüe's "Kickstart My Heart", AC/DC's "Girls Got Rhythm", Bon Jovi's "Livin' On A Prayer", Journey's "Faithfully", Whitesnake's "Still Of The Night", Black Sabbath's "Neon Knights" and Mariah Carey's "Without You" — plus Helloween's "Eagle Fly Free", on which Kai Hansen and Tim Hansen appear.
Eriksplanations Vol. 3 was released on 5 December 2025 with ten tracks: "Rising Force", "Poison", "House of The Rising Sun", "God's Gonna Cut You Down", "I Will Always Love You", "Highway Star", "Sabbath Bloody Sabbath", "Hallelujah", "All By Myself" and "The Final Countdown". Announcing the pre-order, Grönwall noted that volumes 1 and 2 had sold out and that this might be the last one, since he was turning to his own songs — though he had not decided.
The version of Europe's "The Final Countdown" on Eriksplanations Vol. 3 turns the original's euphoria inside out. Grönwall described his reading as dark and slow, and the video for it was shot at Noors Slott, the castle near his home about twenty kilometres north of Stockholm Airport.
After leaving Skid Row, Grönwall kept releasing covers one after another: Aerosmith's "Dream On", Amy Winehouse's "Rehab", Linkin Park's "Numb", John Farnham's "You're The Voice", The Animals' "House Of The Rising Sun" and Black Sabbath's "Sabbath Bloody Sabbath" — with Europe's "The Final Countdown" arriving as part of the same run.
Grönwall has written an autobiography, Power. The Swedish edition was announced for publication by HarperCollins Nordic on 12 September 2024, following his life from his upbringing through Idol, the leukaemia and the recovery, and on to fronting Skid Row. His decision to leave the band in the spring of 2024 is covered too, as a matter of following the values he set down while he was ill.
The description of his autobiography marks the moment Grönwall became known across Sweden as his 2009 Idol win, noting that the accompanying single "Higher" went gold within three weeks.
The same book description sketches his life at the time in a line: born in 1987, living in Knivsta outside Stockholm with his wife and their four-year-old son.
The English edition of the book came out through HarperCollins. It had been scheduled to ship on 21 November 2024 and moved back about two weeks to 6 December. Grönwall explained that when he read the first translation he found that certain nuances and turns of phrase needed adjusting to carry his own voice and intent — the translator had captured the core ideas well, he said, but he wanted the extra time to make it read like his words.
Around the same time as the English print edition, Grönwall recorded an English audiobook himself. Where the Swedish and English print editions were handled by the publisher, the audiobook was a more independent undertaking — something he had never done before, he wrote, and a little outside his comfort zone.
Grönwall has said the book surprised him as much as anyone. He never expected to release an autobiography, least of all at 36 — but sometimes, he said, it feels as though he has lived two lifetimes in about a third of one. If it gives hope to people who are struggling, he added, then it makes the point he wants to make: life after an illness can actually turn out better than before.
Bad Bones, released on 22 May 2026, is Grönwall's first solo album built entirely from original material — and his first solo record of any kind in sixteen years. It was announced on 27 February that year, with the title track going out at the same time.
Some readers took the title Bad Bones as a reference to the bone marrow transplant. Grönwall says it is not that. For him the phrase is closer to a declaration — this is who I am, this is how I am built, step aside, here I come. He has a problem with authority, he says, and has never tried to be what people expect him to be.
Of "Praying For A Miracle", the third single from Bad Bones, Grönwall has said it is about being pushed to the point where all control is gone, everything comes down to one last chance, and all that is left is to hold on and hope. It is deeply personal to him, he says: it takes him back to the moment he first walked on stage with Skid Row, five months after his bone marrow transplant.
Grönwall told Finland's Chaoszine that the album is focused on the previous five or six years, starting from the darkest moment of his life — the leukaemia diagnosis. It was a way of processing everything that had happened in that time, he said, and if he was doing it under his own name it had to be personal and it had to be honest.
Looking back on his 2009 solo debut, Grönwall has said it was Sony Music's album more than his own. He did not really know what he wanted to do at the time, he said, and the record went out far too fast — timed so people could buy it for Christmas — which meant it did not come from the heart. Bad Bones, by contrast, is the album he says he has never been prouder of.
After a long stretch of soul-searching, the answer Grönwall arrived at was a simple one: as an artist he is the sum of everything he has already done — H.E.A.T, Skid Row, Michael Schenker, all of it. He took his time over the record, with Jona Tee beside him, experimenting and discarding things that did not feel right until that answer surfaced.
The two hometown shows Grönwall booked at Cirkus in Stockholm sold out months in advance. They fell on 25 and 26 May 2026, right after the album's release, and were followed by a growing run of festival dates across Scandinavia and the rest of Europe.
A week before the album, on 15 May 2026, a seven-minute mini-documentary called To Hell & Back appeared. It follows the road leading up to Bad Bones — a story, as it was described, about survival and about rediscovering a love of music and songwriting.