Avatar: Ringleading The Metal Circus
Having a gimmick is always a difficult thing for bands to master. It can come across tacky if not done well, yet Swedish heavy metal visionaries Avatar have managed to use their clown aesthetic to make them one of the most highly sought after bands in metal right now. After a productive summer on their own North American headline tour, they embarked on some of the biggest shows in their career.
After completing a trek through Brazilian stadiums with a small London-based band called Iron Maiden, they undertook an arena tour with Sabaton, and secured major festival appearances across the globe with Bloodstock, INKcarceration, Summer Breeze, and Cadott Fest. Because that quite simply isn’t enough, they have spent each morsel of free time in the Swedish wilderness recording their ninth studio album Dance Devil Dance. With this new release on the horizon, we caught up with lead singer Johannes Eckerström to find out exactly how this active summer panned out.
For any band under any rock or metal sub-genre, Iron Maiden are bound to have played some influence no matter how insignificant. As giants of the industry most musicians can find themselves drawn back to their discography and performances, so for the select few that have been able to share a stage with them over the years, moments of nostalgia and reminiscence immediately come to mind. For Avatar, there is no exception to this rule.
“It was the was the first time since we were teenagers where I was proper nervous for a show,” Eckerström recalls. “We have this silly but beloved memory of a very, very drunken night on our first US tour. We were back on the bus after being out raging and we’d listen to all those metal songs that we like so much, and we put on Blood Brothers. It was a weird moment where everybody tore their shirt off and we just hugged like, ‘ah, we’re Blood Brothers’. And so, it was less shitfaced this time for sure. Some of us were even completely sober when they played Blood Brothers, because on that first show we found a good spot to watch the whole thing from above and we hear the crowd as much as we heard them and it’s amazing because the venue is this old quarry. When they played Blood Brothers, we all hug and sing along, with all this very cathartic, full circle fanboying thing.”
Though on the surface they may not be the first band you may think of to support a group of heavy metal icons, there are a lot more similarities than you may first think. There is a love for costumes and performances, much like the infamous Iron Maiden, that translates well among the fanbase. Avatar are so instantly recognisable by their exaggerated make-up that translates into so much more than a garish scheme. Their clown personas, most notably Eckerström’s, are an extension of the band themselves. “It rests on the fact that we are who we are, and we feel like we are circus folk. The whole thing of being a heavy metal band and such a huge part of it was the wanting to run away with the circus. So, it just reflects us accurately and because we write from such a perspective, there’s a mixture of sources from which we draw inspiration from, so it’s very colorful as it is.”
There is no pretence with Avatar. Their music and images grows, evolves and changes and they do the same. This immediately reflects a level of honesty and freshness that is a breath of fresh air in an industry that finds itself revisiting the same styles over and over. “Let however you approach life be the way you approach your music. If you commit to that and bear to be that instead getting stuck – like how old guys dress in the same style they did on the day when they lost their virginity. That’s their peak. If you can move beyond that and dare to evolve and change and let the music reflect who you are, you get the freshness automatically if you are able to stay enthusiastic and curious.”
Now, a lot of bands struggle to make it to the point Avatar has in their career; a ninth album. By this point, many have lost multiple members or have disbanded completely but Eckerström is adamant that this is just a starting point to their rise past the top. “People in your field get to hear every band at some point say ‘this is the best album we’ve ever done’ – we say it every time. But this is the best album we’ve ever done.” And he may not be entirely wrong. It is by far the band’s strongest release in a while and its not just down to the music itself. Eckerström explains, “in terms of coherence and a sense of focus and a sense of purpose it is the strongest thing we have done. We’re thinking about ‘why does this song exist? What is it for? What is the function of the music?’”
“I realised I see the problem in metal, and I’ll even boldly put it that we’re here to save heavy metal. I mean, Megadeth doesn’t necessarily need saving, but there is a problem where a lot of metal is so full of the intricacies that you can do in metal, that it becomes sit down and shut up music,” Eckerström states. “I’ve been to the ballet, and I liked it. I’ve seen opera and I liked it, but I don’t sit down and shut up at a metal show – it’s about the participation. I think there’s a place to treat metal as what it is: rock and roll. Move your feet, get the fuck up there, while still being completely metal about it.”
