In a new interview with Nic and Big J of the Boise, Idaho radio station 100.3 The X Rocks, vocalist Johannes Eckerström of Swedish metallers AVATAR spoke about the band’s upcoming tenth studio album, which will be released later in the year. He said (as transcribed by BLABBERMOUTH.NET): “It’s our tenth album. That’s a high number, and I don’t think many bands on purpose would phone it in at this point. But I think certainly there’s a risk of taking things for granted. And maybe just looking at the trip that we had to make to make this album and to have it make sense making an album, it can be harder and therefore more important than ever the further you go to find a reason, why is this important to us right now? Why does this one matter to us? Why does it matter to us to get to do another one? What do we wanna put on there that we are really passionate about right here right now? And I think we nailed that.
“I’m trying to think about the different songs and different directions it goes,” Johannes continued. “There are all these things that we haven’t done before. I get to pretend that I’m Elton John, meaning that I’ve been playing a bit of piano. But now I get to do it while drums are being played, so I feel I’m in the band — finally, after all these years, I’m in the band. So that’s something. And work with outside musicians for stuff, orchestral things and all that, taking that to the next level. I don’t think this is a prog album, really, but some of our most clearly progressive parts ever are probably on this album.
“An ethos I had for a while, a mantra almost going around was when writing to make the choices and also about what to write and stuff is just trust what’s beautiful,” he explained. “‘Cause I believe the subconscious speaks whatever needs to actually say that might not make sense at the given moment when you’re doing it, but if you find it beautiful as you create it, once upon revisiting, it’s very likely to mean exactly what it needed to mean. So there’s a dream factor to this album, letting the subconscious speak through imagery that I picked up in dreams. There’s a surrealness to it, therefore. And all these groovy, lofty words being said on something that is between 40 and 45 minutes of kick-ass heavy metal and hopefully always with ambition forever and ever and ever when it’s AVATAR that it’s songs that you haven’t heard yet.”
Earlier this month, Eckerström told Meltdown of Detroit’s WRIF radio station about the lyrical inspiration for the first single from AVATAR‘s upcoming LP, “Captain Goat”, which came out in May: “Well, that’s the weird ‘twilight zone’ in which AVATAR exists. AVATAR, as far as a heavy metal band, we really intend to be first and foremost a good time. But at the same time, the writing comes from the whole concept of finding dark rooms in your soul, in your brain, in your mind and open the doors into those forbidden places and kind of air it out, and hopefully by keep on doing this and try to force yourself to be honest with who you are and where you’re at with each album, maybe get closer and closer to some kind of sense of truth. And that side of it, yeah, it’s a dark endeavor, but then I also believe… I don’t know. I believe it’s healthy… It’s that duality of what AVATAR is as a band.”
Asked why “Captain Goat” was chosen to be the first single from AVATAR‘s upcoming album and how it relates to the rest of the LP, Johannes said: “It relates poorly to the whole album because AVATAR doesn’t write the same song twice. So that’s by design, but it just shows that a lot of things are different this time, as they should be and as they always are. [As for] how we choose [the first single from an album]… Well, it kind of reveals itself over time. You just kind of circle back to the people in the demo stage of things while writing and doing the pre-production, what you get excited about then. And already at that stage, there was a lot of excitement about this song as a potential single, as a standout track in that kind of way. ‘Cause it’s a balance.”
He continued: “We always, obviously, try to only put good songs on an album and they’re all there for a reason. And then it’s just a fact of life that some of them are good in a more direct way, I guess. And this, I think, is a very direct song. And whatever people felt at the demo stage of the song comes back when rehearsing it and it comes alive where we really start playing it together — real drums and everything in the room. ‘Cause while writing, we use a lot of drum machines so you can just boom, boom, boom. Everybody can sit and do ideas in their own little corner. So therefore rehearsing is the first time you get to really feel what it feels like being people playing this song before entering the studio and doing it properly there. And in each and every step of this, there’s been something — just one of those songs that were something to it. And, again, I think it stands out in what we usually do, but it’s at the same time built on billing blocks that is part of the way we do our heavy metal.”
Eckerström declined to reveal the title of AVATAR‘s upcoming album, but he said: “It’s a beautiful title. It really ties it together. It invokes mystique and tempting you to break taboos. It lures you into a forbidden place because you see a little light in the dark there, somewhere in the middle between the trees, and that is what the title is all about. And when you see the title, you’re gonna go, like, ‘Ah.'”
AVATAR will embark on a U.S. tour this fall with support from ALIEN WEAPONRY and SPIRITWORLD. Additionally, there are forthcoming tours supporting IRON MAIDEN and METALLICA, along with the band’s biggest show ever in Mexico City.
Photo credit: Johan Carlén
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