New Music Review: AVATAR 'Dance Devil Dance'

Rating: 9 / 10 Stars

AVATAR is: Johannes Eckerström (Vocals), Jonas Jarlsby (Guitars), Tim Öhrström (Guitars), Henrik Sandelin (Bass), and John Alfredsson (Drums)

REVIEW – There is something beautifully dangerous about a band like AVATAR deciding to name an album Dance Devil Dance. It sounds like a command, a dare, a sermon shouted from the center ring of some firelit metal carnival where the preacher has horns, the congregation is grinning, and the exit signs may or may not be real. Set to arrive February 17, 2023 through Black Waltz Records, distributed by Thirty Tigers, Dance Devil Dance stands as the Swedish band’s ninth studio album and another major act of theatrical heavy metal self-mythology from a group that has never been content to simply play loud and leave the rest to chance.

For AVATAR, presentation is never just decoration. The costumes, the grotesque humor, the circus-gone-wrong charisma, the painted faces, the grand gestures, the absurdist danger—all of it serves the songs. That has always been the crucial point. Avatar are not a gimmick band with riffs attached. They are a deeply committed metal band whose sense of theater gives those riffs a larger world to haunt. On Dance Devil Dance, that world seems to become more physical, more ritualistic, and more joyfully possessed.

The title track “Dance Devil Dance” opens the gates with swagger and blood-red invitation. Johannes Eckerström has described the song as a celebration of love, lust, freedom, knowledge, and the idea of becoming the Devil oneself—not as simple evil, but as agency, appetite, and liberation. That framing matters because the song is not merely spooky pageantry. It is Avatar turning damnation into movement. The Devil here is not waiting in judgment. He is on the floor, feet moving, calling everyone else to abandon the dull safety of obedience and join the dance.

“Chimp Mosh Pit” immediately proves that Avatar still understand the importance of being ridiculous in a way that somehow becomes profound through commitment. The title is cartoonish, almost aggressively unserious, but the track’s function is anything but throwaway. Avatar know that heavy music thrives when it remembers the body. Not every idea needs to be dressed in tragedy. Sometimes the point is primitive motion, communal stupidity, sweat, teeth, and the glorious stupidity of bodies colliding because the riff demands tribute.

“Valley of Disease” pulls the album into darker territory, bringing a more sinister pulse and a sense of rot beneath the spectacle. It is one of the album’s clearest reminders that Avatar’s funhouse has trapdoors. The band are very good at letting absurdity and menace coexist, and here the valley feels less like a physical place than a condition: a landscape of spiritual infection, social sickness, and personal contamination. The guitars scrape and lurch with purpose, while Eckerström’s vocal theatricality gives the song its diseased narrator quality.

“On the Beach” is the kind of title that sounds peaceful until Avatar get near it. In their hands, the beach is unlikely to remain a postcard. It becomes a liminal space, where land ends, water begins, and whatever has been buried can wash back up at any moment. The band’s greatest trick is often taking familiar imagery and pushing it just far enough sideways that it becomes strange again. “On the Beach” feels like a pause in the carnival where the horizon opens, but the threat remains.

“Do You Feel in Control” speaks directly to one of Avatar’s central obsessions: agency under pressure. Control, in their universe, is usually theatrical, unstable, and possibly delusional. The question is not “are you in control?” but “do you feel in control?” That distinction matters. Feeling and fact are not the same thing. The song seems to thrive in that gap, turning psychological instability into muscular metal momentum.

“Gotta Wanna Riot” brings a punkish, crowd-baiting energy into the sequence. Avatar have always had a deep understanding of metal as participatory theater, and this track sounds built for collective ignition. The phrase itself is wonderfully clumsy and immediate, like a chant formed in real time by people who may not have a plan but definitely have gasoline. It is not sophisticated rebellion. It is impulse. It is the moment when frustration becomes motion.

Then comes “The Dirt I’m Buried In,” one of the album’s most striking and accessible moments. The song has the kind of chorus that suggests Avatar are capable of reaching far beyond the already converted without dulling their identity. There is melancholy inside it, but also momentum. The title is beautifully grim: not just death, but the specific soil of one’s own entrapment. It suggests memory, consequence, shame, history, and the weight of being covered by what you helped create. The band shared the song ahead of the album as part of the record’s rollout, reinforcing its role as one of Dance Devil Dance’s major statements.

“Clouds Dipped in Chrome” is a title that feels almost glamorously apocalyptic. It has shine and weight, sky and metal, beauty and artificiality. Avatar are excellent at this kind of collision, where the image feels grand but slightly poisoned. The track appears to continue the album’s balancing act between groove, theatricality, and heavy-metal strut, giving the record another moment of strange, reflective spectacle.

“Hazmat Suit” drags the listener back into contamination language, and on an album already dealing in devils, disease, dirt, and riot, that image feels right at home. A hazmat suit is protection from a poisoned environment, but it also implies that the environment may already be lost. Avatar have always had a sharp instinct for turning costume into meaning, and this title practically dresses the listener before the song begins. The question is whether the suit protects you from the world, or the world from you.

“Train” has the potential to be one of the album’s more direct and forceful pieces simply because the image is so physical. A train is momentum, inevitability, machinery, and destination. Once it is moving, it does not care about your hesitation. Avatar’s music often works best when it feels like a vehicle barreling through theatrical fog, and “Train” sounds like it could become that kind of late-album engine: heavy, linear, and impossible to step in front of without consequence.

The album closes with “Violence No Matter What,” featuring Lzzy Hale of Halestorm, and the pairing makes immediate sense. Hale brings arena-sized firepower and a voice capable of standing toe-to-toe with Eckerström’s dramatic force. As a closer, the title feels less like a celebration of violence than an indictment of its permanence. No matter what changes, no matter what costumes the culture wears, violence remains underneath: personal, political, spiritual, physical. Ending there gives Dance Devil Dance a harder edge beneath the party. The dance may be ecstatic, but the world outside the tent is still bleeding.

What makes Dance Devil Dance compelling is that Avatar seem to understand exactly what kind of band they are without becoming trapped by their own formula. This is heavy metal as carnival, yes, but also heavy metal as liberation ritual, grotesque comedy, horror theater, and riff worship. The band recorded the album with producer Jay Ruston, continuing the relationship that has helped sharpen their modern sound into something both muscular and theatrical.

Johannes Eckerström remains one of metal’s most magnetic frontmen because he treats performance not as disguise, but as revelation. Jonas Jarlsby and Tim Öhrström provide the guitar bite and melodic architecture, Henrik Sandelin gives the low end its stalking weight, and John Alfredsson keeps the entire strange machine moving with power and precision. Consequence’s album announcement identifies this same five-piece lineup around the album’s rollout.

The beauty of Dance Devil Dance is that it never seems embarrassed by its own theatrical appetite. Avatar do not wink from a distance. They commit. That commitment is why the strange titles work, why the costumes work, why the big gestures work, and why the band’s metal still lands with force beneath all the devilish showmanship. They understand that absurdity and sincerity are not enemies. In the right hands, they are dance partners.

With Dance Devil Dance, Avatar are poised to deliver one of their most immediate and body-moving records, a heavy metal séance where groove, horror, humor, rebellion, and spectacle circle one another under red light. It is not merely an album title. It is instruction.

The Devil is dancing. Avatar are playing. The only real question is whether you are willing to move.