New Music Review: AVATAR 'Don't Go In The Forest'

Rating: 8.5 / 10 Stars

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

REVIEW – There is a warning built into the title Don’t Go In The Forest, but with AVATAR, warnings have always sounded suspiciously like invitations. The Swedish metal troupe have never been content to simply write heavy songs and leave the theater at the door. They build worlds, invent rituals, light the lamps, sharpen the teeth, and then dare the audience to step closer. With Don’t Go In The Forest, set for release October 31, 2025, through Black Waltz Records AB, marketed and distributed by Thirty Tigers, Avatar prepare their tenth studio album as a haunted carnival of riff, melody, grotesque humor, and psychological pageantry. Apple Music lists the record as a 10-song, 47-minute album, while Blabbermouth confirms the band’s current lineup and the Halloween release date.

The forest, of course, is never just a forest. In fairy tales, it is the place where children vanish, wolves speak, witches wait, and the rules of civilization begin to rot. In Avatar’s hands, it becomes something more personal and more theatrical: a dark interior space full of memory, fantasy, forbidden thoughts, absurdity, danger, and the strange freedom of getting lost on purpose. Johannes Eckerström has described the album as being “filled to the brim” with things Avatar have never done before, and that matters for a band already known for refusing to write the same song twice.

“Tonight We Must Be Warriors” opens the record like a call from beyond the treeline. It has the feeling of a campfire anthem for people who know the night is about to ask something of them. Avatar have always understood the communal side of heavy metal, but this song appears to sharpen that idea into a mission statement. It is not enough to survive the dark. The song suggests that the listener has to stand inside it, claim it, and fight through it. The band’s sense of theater remains intact, but the emotional core feels direct: solidarity through shared pain, courage through performance, and spectacle as a form of armor.

“In The Airwaves” brings a more urgent charge, the kind of track built to move bodies before the brain has time to analyze the machinery. Avatar’s best songs often balance absurdity with precision, and this one seems ready to thrive in that tension. The title suggests transmission, infection, signal, and reach. It feels like the band taking their circus frequency and pushing it out across every available channel. The result is the kind of modern Avatar track that can feel both ridiculous and deadly serious, because for this band, the ridiculous is often how the serious survives.

Then comes “Captain Goat,” one of the album’s most immediately Avatar-like moments in the best possible sense. The title alone feels like it should not work, and that is exactly why it does. Eckerström has spoken about the track as part of Avatar’s strange twilight-zone identity: a band that wants heavy metal to be a good time while also opening dark rooms in the soul and airing out the forbidden places. That duality is the key. “Captain Goat” may grin, strut, and stomp, but behind the grin is the unsettling knowledge that Avatar’s jokes usually have bones beneath them.

The title track “Don’t Go In The Forest” feels like the album’s central doorway. If the opening songs gather the traveling party, this is where the path disappears. Avatar’s music has always carried a cinematic quality, but here that quality feels especially important. The title track does not need to explain the forest because everyone already knows what the forest means in the subconscious. It is curiosity. It is disobedience. It is danger disguised as wonder. It is the moment a warning becomes irresistible. Avatar are at their strongest when they turn that kind of symbolic language into something physical, when the riff becomes a branch snapping behind you.

“Death And Glitz” sounds like a perfect Avatar contradiction: corpse and spotlight, rot and sequins, the end dressed for the stage. Few bands are better at making morbidity feel glamorous without making it harmless. The song’s title suggests the spectacle of decay, the way culture aestheticizes ruin until the audience forgets there was ever a body under the costume. In Avatar’s world, death is rarely silent. It dances. It poses. It sings. It gets lit from below and sent on tour.

“Abduction Song” pulls the record into stranger and darker territory. The title sounds childlike at first, almost like something from a nightmare nursery rhyme, and that is where its threat begins. Avatar have long understood how innocence and horror can occupy the same frame. This track seems positioned as one of the album’s more theatrical nightmares, the kind of song that turns captivity, disappearance, and surreal dread into a crooked little stage play. The band’s ability to make menace colorful is one of their great strengths, and “Abduction Song” appears to lean into that talent without apology.

“Howling At The Waves” offers a shift in emotional temperature. The title is beautiful because it suggests futility, grief, and defiance at once. To howl at waves is to scream at something that will not answer and cannot stop. Avatar’s theatrical instincts often lean toward the grotesque, but they also know how to locate melancholy inside spectacle. This song feels like it may be one of the record’s more open emotional passages, where the carnival lights dim and the vastness outside the tent suddenly becomes visible.

“Dead And Gone Back Again” is another title that feels tailor-made for Avatar’s love of contradiction. Dead and gone should be final. Back again makes it cyclical, theatrical, almost comic. In that phrase is the whole heavy metal relationship with death: it is terrifying, yes, but also endlessly resurrected, staged, sung about, laughed at, and dragged back from the grave for one more chorus. Avatar are a resurrection machine in their own way, constantly reinventing old metal theatrics for a new kind of audience. This track seems ready to treat death not as an ending, but as another costume change.

“Take This Heart And Burn It” brings the album’s emotional violence closer to the body. The image is devotional and destructive at once, a surrender that feels almost ceremonial. Avatar have always been good at making dramatic gestures feel earned because they commit to them fully. There is no half-theater in this band. If the heart is going to burn, it will burn under lights, with a grin, a scream, and a riff sharp enough to leave marks.

The closing “Magic Lantern” is a perfect final image. A magic lantern is an early projection device, a machine of light and illusion, a way to cast ghosts onto a wall. As an album closer, the title suggests that everything in the forest may have been projection, memory, nightmare, performance, or all of it at once. Avatar’s entire career has played with that boundary between band and illusion, metal show and traveling theater. Ending here feels right: not with a clean escape from the woods, but with an image flickering after the story is over.

What makes Don’t Go In The Forest compelling is that Avatar appear to be leaning further into the thing that makes them singular. They are not just a metal band with theatrical presentation. They are a theatrical organism that uses metal as its bloodstream. The riffs matter. The hooks matter. The physicality matters. But the full Avatar experience also depends on character, contrast, humor, dread, and the feeling that each album opens another wing of a haunted attraction no one should have built this well.

This is also a band that understands showmanship as serious craft. Johannes Eckerström remains one of metal’s most charismatic frontmen because he treats performance as revelation rather than disguise. Jonas Jarlsby and Tim Öhrström give the band its guitar muscle and melodic bite, Henrik Sandelin keeps the low end moving with grim authority, and John Alfredsson’s drumming provides the theatrical engine beneath the madness. Atom Splitter PR’s Avatar press page lists the same current lineup and connects the band to its official web presence.

The danger with a band this visually and conceptually rich is that the songs can become secondary to the circus. Avatar have mostly avoided that trap by remaining stubbornly song-focused beneath the costumes. Don’t Go In The Forest seems ready to continue that tradition, offering hooks, strangeness, aggression, and enough left turns to remind listeners that Avatar’s forest is not a straight path. It is a place of wrong-footed beauty, black humor, and sudden teeth.

With Don’t Go In The Forest, Avatar are poised to deliver a record that feels like a Halloween release in spirit as much as schedule: eerie, theatrical, mischievous, heavy, colorful, and crawling with forbidden thoughts. The warning is clear. The forest is dark. The band are waiting somewhere inside it.

Naturally, we are going in.