It’s always a pleasure to speak with Avatar ring master (or should that be ring leader?) Johannes Eckerström. The lead singer with the fierce face paint and vocal range the size of a continent has a lot going on in that head of his – much of which has spilled out into new album ‘Don’t Go In The Forest’. Devolution’s Jo Wright talks influences, inspiration behind the new album and unexpected early careers with our favourite freak. But first, how do you describe the indescribable, Johannes? Who or what is Avatar? Your band are the best at what you do but, erm, what is it exactly that you do?
‘I’m not so sure that there are other bands who do it quite the way we do it, so if you start your own league you can easily be the number one in it!’ the frontman obliges. ‘We’re certainly the best Scandinavian metal band called Avatar that’s currently out there!
‘Avatar’s a thing on its own. It’s obviously a metal band but beyond that, when people want to categorise us, or when we want to categorise ourselves, it’s tricky. You can pick it apart and say that when we started playing and learning to play together, there was a lot of death metal, a lot of melodic death metal and technical death metal… There was a lot of Cryptopsy, Meshuggah, At The Gates, The Haunted – The Haunted more than anything! There was In Flames, some Iron Maiden, some Helloween, some Slayer, so our roots are pretty extreme. But then we started to really rekindle our relationship with more classic heavy metal and rock and roll, and then garage rock and all kinds of things went in there, including industrial metal. We don’t worry too much about what the Avatar sound is. I’m a Beatles fan and seeing how much they changed and evolved in just eight years of releasing albums but all their music sounds like The Beatles! And the secret is that if you’ve written it yourself and not brought in outside song writers, and you’ve recorded it yourself, you are your own studio musician, so that’s the sound.’
‘Don’t Go In The Forest’ is the band’s tenth studio album. Tell us about that please Mr Eckerström. ‘What comes with that,’ he says in his lovely wise and philosophical fashion, ‘is a question; why is it important to make this album for us? – beyond the fact that over the years we got away with making this our jobs, which is incredible!’
But money isn’t a motivator to make new music for the Avatar boys. ‘Part of the reason is purely music and finding new challenges, writing new songs and making sure they reflect where we are at right now as people.’
Each of Avatar’s albums was a reflection of who they were and what they were feeling at the time of writing – so the Avatar of ten years ago wrote very differently to the band today. And the Avatar in ten years’ time will be sounding very different too.
Johannes tell us that this time around, with ‘Don’t Go In The Forest’, a lot of the lyrics were written as a result of putting more trust into his subconscious, and not rushing to analyse what these words meant.
‘Growing up, having read lots of band interviews which had all these things to say about the meaning of their songs, when I was young it made me think that you needed to know all of that before you struck the first chord. And I’ve been unlearning that over the years!’
That being said, one song that has a definite meaning – which is actually deep and distressing – is ‘Death and Glitz’, a pumping disco toe-tapping head-banging song that juxtaposes a culture that rightly condemns but can also be sickeningly intrigued by violence towards women. Johannes explains, ‘I was fascinated by how disturbed and uneasy I felt around the true crime genre. There’s the extreme popularity of it. Then you combine what stories they are telling with why is the dead person always a young, attractive woman? It’s rarely a sad, lonely old bloke somewhere because that tragedy doesn’t tickle our fancy in the same way. As I sing in the song, people just like ‘death and tits’ basically.’
From back in their early melodic speed metal days through to fairytale fiction inspired ‘Feathers and Flesh’, building their own kingdom (captured musically in ‘Avatar Country’ and making minimal use of Slipknot frontman Corey Taylor’s talents (more on this later), Johannes’ career with Avatar has been eye-widening. But one of his career paths in the real world before he tootled off to Avatar Country is pretty jaw-dropping. Well, it’s not what you’d probably expect…
He was a teacher.
Sort of.
‘Before doing this full time my day jobs were always substituting in schools and kindergartens, and summer camps,’ he tells a slightly gobsmacked Jo. ‘No degree! Just raw natural talent. I also discovered, with having lots of different kinds of jobs, is that all jobs are exactly the same at the end of the day,’ Johannes laughs. ‘When I was 19, the whole point was to have jobs I could leave whenever. Substitute is to simply not be available, so that was the start of it. And I come from a family of teachers so I learned through immersion really! But I know the first time you go into a class of ninth graders and you kind of take a deep breath – it’s basically a gig and you’re gonna be fine! But also before going out on stage for big shows, it’s the same – taking a deep breath and thinking, ‘well it’s basically a classroom. It’s going to be fine!’
Do you seriously get nervous before you play Johannes? Because it’s pretty hard to imagine that animated, heavily made-up, massive personality of a circus leader devouring his adoring crowd is filled with anything but utter confidence. ‘Only when we opened for Iron Maiden for the first time in Brazil. We regressed to being 15-year-olds!’
It went further than fangirling too. ‘It was deeper than that,’ says Johannes. ‘There were so many feelings – like things coming full circle really.’
Will the same emotions engulf the Avatar guys when they open for Metallica in July?
‘I think now we’ve had practise to handle the emotions. We’ve played with heroes of ours before,’ says Johannes, before adding, ‘but it’s huge!’
As promised, let’s go back to Slipknot screamer Corey Taylor’s guest spot on Avatar’s 2020 album ‘Hunter Gatherer’. The Avatar boys made good use of his talents – they got him to whistle on ‘A Secret Door’…
‘He did some shouting on ‘Colossus’ as well,’ Johannes concedes. ‘Two of my greatest role models when it comes to being creative – who have kept their thing going for years and years, and let it evolve as they age and change, and as sensibilities change, are Matt Stone and Trey Parker [South Park creators]. I’m a huge South Park fan. We all are.
‘The reason I mention them is that [on the show] Jay Leno was Cartman’s cat and I think Jerry Seinfeld was Turkey Number Four or Turkey Number Two in a Thanksgiving special. It’s a funny thing to do! We can say, ‘yeah! Corey Taylor’s on the album – we’re not lying! Here’s the footage! It was a fun exchange as well. He got it immediately. He understood why it was funny and great, but then when he stood in front of the microphone he became very serious and he starts doing multiple takes to get the right whistle. It’s still music! He still did a good job whistling!’
‘Don’t Go In The Forest’ was released on Halloween (when else?) and sounds everything like Avatar while being nothing quite like they’ve done before. Which is a sentiment fans will expect of an album which is full of the unexpected. Does that make sense? Help us out please Johannes. ‘We never want to write the same song twice. That’s a huge part of our mission statement.’
He adds, ‘I think every art project that a person does, and in our case making albums and writing songs, it’s an opportunity to peel another layer of bullshit off yourself. I was completely truthful on our debut album as well, but you grow, you change, you mature and you find ways of going a bit deeper with things. Maybe when you’re younger you want to be more powerful by sounding powerful. There’s a certain vulnerability there as well, but there’s still a wish to be strong when you’re young. But now more strength is found through vulnerability, maybe in a way that I wouldn’t have pulled off before.’
How about the origins of the album title? ‘Every other Avatar album starts with a big plan early on. ‘Avatar Country’ was like that, ‘Dance Devil Dance’ was like that. Then, in between, we need to explore more and see what it becomes. What that also means is we were recording vocals here in Helsinki and on one of the last days, when we’re pretty much done, it’s where you go, ‘Goddamn! We need a fucking title!’, so what did we do? It doesn’t have to be a song title, but that’s one way of doing it, so we started looking there.’
Of course when most of us reading this are told not to go into the forest, off we pop into the bloody forest, and this idea – along with the excitement and curiosity of what’s in this forest, was one of those that attracted the band to the name.
On the flip side of that, what would actually keep Johannes out of the forest? Could anything scare him away? ‘I have a certain fear of failure,’ he confesses.
Ten studio albums in? Playing colossal venues? Shows all over the world? Millions of streams? None of that adds up to anything but success, Avatar. And as we enjoy the afterglow of ‘Don’t Go In The Forest’ we can’t wait to see what’s still to come from this band.
Interview by Jo Wright
Photos by Johan Carlen