Avatar frontman let ‘the subconscious take the wheel’ on new album, ’Don’t Go in the Forest’

Avatar is celebrating Halloween with new music.

The Swedish metal outfit’s milestone 10th studio effort, Don’t Go in the Forest, drops Friday.

“We do one [album] with a plan, with a very clear idea at the beginning,” frontman Johannes Eckerström tells ABC Audio of Avatar’s approach to making records. “Then we do another one where, because of having done it like that before, it becomes necessary to kind of see where things [take] us.”

Don’t Go in the Forest very much fits into the latter category, with a range of sounds including the fist-pumping anthem of “Tonight We Must Be Warriors” and the metal sea shanty “Captain Goat.” Eckerström also took a more throw-things-at-the-wall approach with the lyrics on Don’t Go in the Forest.

“I put a trust in a sense of beauty rather than necessarily always understanding where I was going with what I was writing,” Eckerström says. “That meant kinda letting the subconscious take the wheel.”

Avatar’s last album, 2023’s Dance Devil Dance, spawned the band’s first #1 hit on the Billboard Mainstream Rock Airplay chart in the single “The Dirt I’m Buried In.” It’s fitting, then, that Don’t Go in the Forest includes a song called “In the Airwaves,” though Eckerström wasn’t thinking of Avatar’s radio play when he wrote it.

“Especially not maybe with the fastest song we have done in a long time,” he laughs.

Overall, Eckerström didn’t want the success of “The Dirt I’m Buried In” to impact how he and his bandmates wrote music.

“We always believe in not writing the same song twice,” he says. “So we can’t let that then become, ‘Oh, that worked that one time, maybe it will work again,’ and start falling into the trap of the law of diminishing returns.”