Avatar Announces New Album + 2025 North American Tour Dates
Consider this your fair warning, but whether you heed it or not will make all the difference.
The heavy metal visionaries collectively known as Avatar — vocalist Johannes Eckerström, guitarists Jonas Jarlsby and Tim Ă–hrström, bassist Henrik Sandelin, and drummer John Alfredsson — are thrilled to announce the thoroughly fitting October 31 release of their latest masterwork, Don’t Go in the Forest. Pre-save it here.
The band also share the video for “Tonight We Must Be Warriors.”Watch it here.
“It has become a necessity to me over the years to be able to answer one question: Why is this important? It can’t be just another album. We need to discover something, try something else. It has to come from the heart. What is being said matters,” says vocalist Eckerström regarding the release of single “Tonight We Must Be Warriors.” He continues, “In days of isolation and despair, maybe we need to be reminded that we are not alone? We are one of many. Maybe we also need a reminder that the burden is on our shoulders? To get it done, we need to do the fighting ourselves.”
He finishes, “In our shared pain, we find solidarity.”
Regarding the album, Eckerström offers, “The secret ingredient is that we still feel like we’re just getting started. Don’t Go In The Forest is an album filled to the brim with stuff we’ve never done before. It’s all songs and concepts we haven’t been close to touch until now. The mind is wild and we have lost ourselves in the darkest woods, filled with memories, and fantasies. Forbidden thoughts that must be spoken.”
He concludes, “It would have been impossible to make this album at any other time than now. That’s all we ever wanted, and I think you’ll find it’s all you ever wanted too.”
Did you enter the forest via the new track?
Avatar have gone from strength to strength over the past several years. There’s the critically acclaimed, 2023-released album Dance Devil Dance, which included their first #1 at Billboard’s Mainstream Rock Airplay, “The Dirt I’m Buried In.” There have been scores of sold-out headline shows across the globe, and an actual fossil named after them. The list goes on and on.
But the past is the past and the future is, well, dark in the best possible way, and that’s JUST how Avatar like it!
The track listing for Don’t Go in the Forest will be revealed in due course. The band has previously shared “Captain Goat” and “In the Airwaves.”
Avatar will spend the foreseeable future (if not forever) on the road — with forthcoming tours supporting Iron Maiden and Metallica, along with the band’s biggest show EVER in Mexico City. See below for a complete rundown of the band’s planned tour activity.
Avatar show no signs of pausing to take a breath in their quest for absolute world domination — much less stopping.
Avatar 2025 US Headlining Tour Dates with Alien Weaponry and SpiritWorld
11/5/25: Phoenix, AZ — The Van Buren
11/6/25: San Diego, CA — The Observatory San Diego
11/7/25: Riverside, CA — Riverside Municipal Auditorium
11/8/25: Las Vegas, NV — Brooklyn Bowl
11/10/25: Seattle, WA — Moore Theater
11/11/25: Portland, OR — Roseland Theatre
11/12/25: Boise, ID — Revolution
11/14/25: Salt Lake City, UT — The Union
11/15/25: Denver, CO — Fillmore
11/17/25: Minneapolis, MN — Fillmore
11/18/25: Madison, WI — The Sylvee
11/20/25: Detroit, MI — The Fillmore Detroit
11/21/25: Pittsburgh, PA — Stage AE
11/22/25: Columbus, OH — KEMBA Live!
11/23/25: Silver Spring, MD — The Fillmore Silver Spring
11/25/25: Huntington, NY — Paramount
11/26/25: Boston, MA — House of Blues
11/28/25: Allentown, PA — Archer Music Hall
11/29/25: Charlotte, NC — The Fillmore Charlotte
11/30/25: Louisville, KY — Old Forester’s Paristown Hall
12/2/25: Chicago, IL — Riviera Theater
12/4/25: Nashville, TN — Marathon Music Works
12/6/25: Tulsa, OK — Tulsa Theater
12/7/25: Dallas, TX — House of Blues
About Avatar:
As a strange light in the sky beckons you towards something forbidden, far away, you see a robed, horned ferryman, rowing across a restless sea at the end of days. Back home, a strange sound rolls through your house. It comes from the basement. The news talks about a beautiful corpse, lauded for her magnificent demise on a dance floor by men who could have fixed her. You catch the last broadcast from an outpost succumbing to flames on a distant moon. Its inhabitants try to outrun their own madness. Outside, there is a place you’re not allowed to go, no matter how intoxicating the gaze of the eyes among the trees.
You lay awake at night, yet you dream thousand dreams more real than any waking moment.
Strange times call for a strange band. With a life long commitment to the misfit arts, Avatar delves deep into the collective subconscious. They travel beyond the realms of flesh, and far past the spiritual barriers broken in past works. No matter how many times they were warned, they keep treading deeper into the woods. There is sense to be made out of the senseless. They lay a soft gaze upon terrifying, almost shapeless inner landscapes, and they have a damn good time doing it.
Don’t go in the forest is a warning said by others, heeded as a challenge for a certain kind of freak who just can’t fight the urge to seek truth and feel alive. It is a collection of strange tunes emerging from a circus tent in a meadow in a faraway valley. You can only ever get there by accident, walking a path impossible to remember and map out. Two eyes closed, one eye open.
Formed by John Alfredsson and Jonas Jarlsby as teenagers, soon joined by Johannes Eckerström, Henrik Sandelin, and Simon Andersson, Avatar started an evolution that would see a group always looking to connect what you hear with what you see. Once Andersson left and Tim Öhrström joined, they had all the ingredients to a brew so potent it would forge their names into the souls of millions. More than a band, Avatar has evolved to concept art. In order to keep going with the same drive as they had on day one, they make sure that what is made must be done. Every single time must matter more than ever before. No matter how far they get, they are sworn to remain underdogs. There is so much to do, to try. So many ways to rediscover the simple yet sublime power hidden inside an electric guitar.
It’s all about trying new things, on and off stage. Choirs, brass instruments, Moogs, piano, cellos and violas. As long as it all worships at the altar of the riff, the possibilities are as vast as the universe. Don’t Go in the Forest once again stretches, bends, and breaks the boundaries of what Avatar is and can be by providing both the most introspective as well as their most explosive moments. It is all done in a way that can only be achieved after a lifetime in servitude to the madness, where all your gathered experiences are used to be reborn. In other words, by embracing discovery as the core tenet for what they do, every new release is as fresh and exciting as their very first time in a rehearsal room.
While the studio experience is becoming a more and more powerful tool for self expression, it is on the stage where Avatar truly comes alive. Every testimonial makes the same claims in all caps. Avatar is a MUST SEE experience. Every album cycle has provided record breaking milestones. A few of the more recent ones being kicking the door in on Latin America, first with Iron Maiden, and then with sold out shows all throughout Mexico and beyond. They have also become the talk of countless festivals across Europe and the United States, being a surefire stage closer and show stealer everywhere they go, all while setting attendance record after attendance record for their headline shows. From Australia to Brazil. From Scandinavia to the Mediterranean Sea. From the Pacific Northwest to the Deep South. Everywhere they go, their unique blend of suggestive theatrics and unabashed, unapologetic good heavy metal times, they have proven that there is only one Avatar, and everyone else is playing for second place. Their impact is shown with chart toppers such as “The Dirt I’m Buried In,” reaching heights that are hard to imagine from a band that has stepped into the craziest era in music history, taking matters into their own hand with their own independent label, Black Waltz Records.
For centuries, the circus would come to town. Now, for the first time in history, the gravitational pull of Avatar is so strong that the town is coming to the circus. A circus deep in the forest. A forbidden place. A taboo you are destined to break.
Line up:
Johannes Eckerström — Vocalist
Jonas Jarlsby — Guitarist
Tim Öhrström — Guitarist
Henrik Sandelin — Bassist
John Alfredsson — Drummer
