JOHANNES ECKERSTRÖM Leads AVATAR Into Their Darkest Chapter Yet
Inside the Shadows of ‘Don’t Go In The Forest’
AVATAR has always lived somewhere between heavy metal spectacle, psychological theater, and pure rock-and-roll danger. With ‘Don’t Go In The Forest’, the Swedish metal force pushes that world into darker, stranger, and more vulnerable territory. Released on October 31, 2025, the album clocks in at 10 songs and 47 minutes, marking another major creative shift for a band that has built its reputation on refusing to stay still.
In a recent interview with Metal Insider, frontman JOHANNES ECKERSTRÖM opened up about the creative risks behind the record, explaining that the biggest leap came through his vocals. Rather than relying only on the explosive force fans expect, Eckerström leaned further into melody, range, and lyrical clarity, giving the album more emotional space while still keeping AVATAR rooted in heavy metal intensity.
That willingness to step into uncomfortable territory seems to define the entire album. ‘Don’t Go In The Forest’ is not just horror imagery for the sake of atmosphere. It sounds like a band walking into the subconscious and refusing to turn back. Eckerström described the writing process as more intuitive this time, trusting abstract ideas, dreams, and buried emotional impulses instead of over-explaining every song before it had a chance to become something alive.
“Death and Glitz” Takes Aim at True Crime Obsession
One of the most compelling parts of the interview comes through his discussion of “Death and Glitz”, a song that takes aim at modern true crime obsession. Eckerström does not approach the subject like a lecture. He frames it as self-examination first, questioning why audiences are so drawn to polished stories of death, trauma, and victimhood when those stories often do very little for the people left behind. His point cuts deep: when real suffering becomes entertainment, the line between awareness and exploitation gets ugly fast.
That is where AVATAR feels most dangerous on this album. The band is not simply building another haunted-house metal record. They are asking what people are willing to consume, what they are willing to ignore, and what parts of themselves they would rather keep hidden. The forest in the title becomes more than a setting. It becomes the forbidden place inside the mind where grief, fantasy, fear, violence, ego, and catharsis all start bleeding into each other.
At the same time, ‘Don’t Go In The Forest’ does not abandon the foundation that made AVATAR such a force. Eckerström emphasized that every AVATAR album is still connected to what came before, even when the sound changes. The band still revolves around riffs, collective songwriting, and the push to excite each other creatively. The difference now is maturity. AVATAR sounds less interested in proving what they can do and more interested in discovering what else they can become.
From the Forest to METALLICA’s Stadium Stage
That evolution is arriving at a massive moment for the band. METALLICA officially announced that AVATAR will join select 2026 European M72 World Tour dates alongside PANTERA, with the tour’s rotating support also including GOJIRA and KNOCKED LOOSE. For ECKERSTRÖM, the connection carries real weight. In the Metal Insider interview, he called the opportunity a full-circle moment, tracing part of AVATAR’s origin story back to METALLICA’s influence on drummer JOHN ALFREDSSON and the early spark that helped set the band in motion.
The official AVATAR tour schedule currently includes 2026 appearances in Budapest, Dublin, and London, placing the band in front of stadium-sized audiences at a time when their music is becoming even more layered, personal, and unsettling. That contrast is exactly what makes this chapter so fascinating. AVATAR is stepping onto some of the biggest stages in metal while releasing one of their most inward-looking records.
‘Don’t Go In The Forest’ feels like a challenge from a band that still wants to feel like beginners, even after years of building a fiercely devoted following. It is theatrical, but not hollow. It is dark, but not empty. It is heavy, but not afraid to be vulnerable. With JOHANNES ECKERSTRÖM pulling back another layer of the mask, AVATAR has entered a new phase where the horror is not just in the imagery—it is in the honesty.
SUPPORTING METALLICA — SUMMER 2026:
5/24 — Frankfurt, DE — Deutsche Bank Park
6/11 — Budapest, HU — Puskas Arena
6/19 — Dublin, IE — Aviva Stadium
7/5 — London, UK — London Stadium
ABOUT AVATAR:
As a strange light in the sky beckons you towards something forbidden, far away, you see a robed, horned ferryman, rowing across a restless sea at the end of days. Back home a strange sound rolls through your house. It comes from the basement. The news talks about a beautiful corpse, lauded for her magnificent demise on a dance floor by men who could have fixed her. You catch the last broadcast from an outpost succumbing to flames on a distant moon. Its inhabitants try to outrun their own madness. Outside there is a place you’re not allowed to go, no matter how intoxicating the gaze of the eyes among the trees.
You lay awake at night, yet you dream thousand dreams more real than any waking moment.
Strange times call for a strange band. With a life long commitment to the misfit arts, Avatar delves deep into the collective subconscious. They travel beyond the realms of flesh and far past the spiritual barriers broken in past works. No matter how many times they were warned, they keep treading deeper into the woods. There is sense to be made out of the senseless. They lay a soft gaze upon terrifying, almost shapeless inner landscapes, and they have a damn good time doing it.
Don’t go in the forest is a warning said by others, heeded as a challenge for a certain kind of freak who just can’t fight the urge to seek truth and feel alive. It is a collection of strange tunes emerging from a circus tent in a meadow in a faraway valley. You can only ever get there by accident, walking a path impossible to remember and map out. Two eyes closed, one eye open.
Formed by John Alfredsson and Jonas Jarlsby as teenagers, soon joined by Johannes Eckerström, Henrik Sandelin and Simon Andersson, Avatar started an evolution that would see a group always looking to connect what you hear with what you see. Once Andersson left and Tim Öhrström joined, they had all the ingredients to a brew so potent it would forge their names into the souls of millions. More than a band, Avatar has evolved to concept art. In order to keep going with the same drive as they had on day one, they make sure that what is made must be done. Every single time must matter more than ever before. No matter how far they get, they are sworn to remain underdogs. There is so much to do, to try. So many ways to rediscover the simple yet sublime power hidden inside an electric guitar.
It’s all about trying new things, on and off stage. Choirs, brass instruments, Moogs, piano, cellos and violas. As long as it all worships at the altar of the riff, the possibilities are as vast as the universe. Don’t go in the forest once again stretches, bends and breaks the boundaries of what Avatar is and can be by providing both the most introspective as well as their most explosive moments. It is all done in a way that can only be achieved after a lifetime in servitude to the madness where all your gathered experiences are used to be reborn. In other words, by embracing discovery as the core tenet for what they do, every new release is as fresh and exciting as their very first time in a rehearsal room.
While the studio experience is becoming a more and more powerful tool for self expression, it is on the stage where Avatar truly comes alive. Every testimonial makes the same claims in all caps. Avatar is a MUST SEE experience. Every album cycle has provided record breaking milestones. A few of the more recent ones being kicking the door in on Latin America, first with Iron Maiden, and then with sold out shows all throughout Mexico and beyond. They have also become the talk of countless festivals across Europe and the United States, being a surefire stage closer and show stealer everywhere they go, all while setting attendance record after attendance record for their headline shows. From Australia to Brazil. From Scandinavia to the Mediterranean Sea. From the Pacific Northwest to the Deep South. Everywhere they go, their unique blend of suggestive theatrics and unabashed, unapologetic good heavy metal times, they have proven that there is only one Avatar and everyone else is playing for second place. Their impact is shown with chart toppers such as “The Dirt I’m Buried In” reaching heights that are hard to imagine from a band that has stepped into the craziest era in music history, taking matters into their own hand with their own independent label, Black Waltz Records.
For centuries the circus would come to town. Now, for the first time in history, the gravitational pull of Avatar is so strong that the town is coming to the circus. A circus deep in the forest. A forbidden place. A taboo you are destined to break.
AVATAR ARE
Johannes Eckerström — Vocalist
Jonas Jarlsby — Guitarist
Tim Öhrström — Guitarist
Henrik Sandelin — Bassist
John Alfredsson — Drummer
AVATAR ONLINE:
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Source: Based on Metal Insider’s interview with JOHANNES ECKERSTRÖM of AVATAR, conducted by Zenae Zukowski.