Back Down Under: Johannes Eckerström Talks Avatar’s Expanding Tour and New Chapter
As Avatar gear up for their long‑awaited return to Australia, frontman Johannes Eckerström is equal parts reflective and restless, a performer who thrives on the road, on new cities, and on the unpredictable alchemy of a live crowd. Speaking from a hotel room in the final stretch of their US run, he dives into the art of building a setlist, the evolving mythology of the band’s latest album, and the thrill of exploring places that still feel “close to another planet.” What follows is a conversation about touring, growth, and the strange, joyful chaos that keeps Avatar moving forward.
Great to be talking to you, you must be really looking forward to and counting down to August for your return Australian tour?
Most definitely. It’s only the second time we get to go, and everything about the first trip was amazing. Now we get to do a little more of it, more of the good stuff. I was a happy performer and a happy tourist all rolled into one. I saw a lot of kangaroos and no spiders, which is basically what every Swede hopes for when coming over.
Not sure! So you’ve got a bit of a phobia against spiders?
No, not really, it’s just that your spiders are so famously deadly. Except for the really horrific‑looking ones that aren’t deadly but still manage to terrify the rest of us. Meanwhile, the big ones are apparently good to keep around the house because they eat the smaller, dangerous ones, if I remember correctly. Correct me if I’m wrong, but it’s something like that, right.
Do you start to really look forward to playing places for the first time, like Adelaide, on this tour?
Yes, that’s the thing, as I’m sitting here talking to you, we’re in a hotel room with two more shows to go in the US, which has been our mainstay for a long time. It’s really where Avatar took off, where things started happening for us. That’s great, and I have a lot of friends here and a fantastic audience here. But I also know every product in the grocery stores, I know what the sidewalks look like, everything is familiar. Finding new places you haven’t touched yet is one of the great joys of doing this. So I’m absolutely looking forward to it, and I’ll make sure to see at least one thing when I’m there. You don’t always have time to really explore a city while you’re on tour, but if I can see one thing in Adelaide, I’ll be happy.
Do you have a lot of great tour stories and memories from last time you were here in 2023?
I mean, usually the really great tour stories come from something wild happening. The Australian tour was the opposite, very smooth. Great crowds, especially considering it was our first time coming over, and I got to do all the classic things: take the Sydney Opera selfie, hold a koala, all of that. It was such smooth sailing that at one show I ended up physically assaulting our guitar tech for a few seconds, just so he’d have something to talk about when we left. But aside from that, it was simply a really nice time. And considering the jet lag could’ve completely wiped us out, it was a relief that everything lined up and made for really good shows.
I guess for those who are a little bit slow in catching on, what can they expect when they see Avatar live here in Australia?
Well, you know, only the greatest frontman of our generation, with a fantastic band to back him up. No, but really, the best description we have for what we do is that it’s a metal circus, which is very different from being circus metal. It’s not some goofy little subgenre; it’s our way of approaching the eclectic nature of our music. Everything you hear in the songs, we work hard to visualize and express on stage, and it becomes a full musical journey. All the different directions we’ve taken over the years get woven together in a way that makes sense to us — and to the people who connect with what we do. If you get it, you get it. And if you get it, you get it good. There’s a special sense of connection in that room, something you genuinely want to be part of.
Are you focusing mostly on the new album, Don’t Go Into the Forest?
It’s a healthy mix. When we put together a setlist for a tour, you can divide it into three parts. The first is what you might call the hits, or, the way I see it, the traditions you build with your audience over the years. To a degree, you want to respect and preserve that, so there are certain songs that need to be there. We’re very tough on ourselves about what qualifies, and we try to keep that section short to leave room for everything else. That usually means songs like Eagle Has Landed, Bloody Angel, Let It Burn, Hail the Apocalypse, and so on.
The second third is the new material. I take great pride in the fact that we’ve reached our tenth studio album and are as excited about what we’re doing now as ever, and just as proud of the new songs. The audience response speaks for itself, so we make sure a solid portion of the set is the latest work.
The final third is where we look for deep cuts, something for the die‑hard fan who loves track seven on the sixth album just as much as the casual listener loves the big songs. We rotate those in and out to give different parts of the audience their moment with their Avatar song. The goal is to find a healthy balance between all three sections and shape them into a structure that gives the show a sense of narrative. You can’t just throw the songs in a pile and pick an order. The right song has to be in the right place to convey the right feeling and take the audience on that trip with us. It’s a little bit of an art form and a little bit of a science.
It must be a tough balance of old new as far as the set list goes?
Yeah, and again, I think the way we deal with it is by knowing a handful of broadly speaking “people‑pleasers,” right? You play those, great. Then the rest of the set is in service of the show, the structure, and giving individuals their moments while hopefully getting a good spread. And then, selfishly, because this album is new, we ended up focusing on the singles, the songs with videos, the ones people already know. That means half the album hasn’t been touched live yet, and a couple of cycles from now we might look back and say, “We never got to do that one live, we want to.” So there are a lot of factors at play. It can be tough, I guess, but I enjoy the process. It’s all good.
Have you been really pleased with the response to the new album Don’t Go in the Forest?
It’s been great. Up close, I really feel the band has grown. We managed to make an album that doesn’t feel like we repeated ourselves, and people still came along for the ride, that’s a good sign. You can really see the difference, too. We started touring on the day the album was released, in Mexico City, and people dug what they heard. But slowly, through that first US tour, you could tell the shift: now they didn’t just like it, they’d heard it a couple of times, they knew the chorus. And now, what is it, half a year later? It already feels like a solid part of the greater Avatar mythology, and you can tell.
Was it as challenging an album to make as what you thought it would be?
Yeah, but that’s always by design. Finding the challenge is important, finding a way for it to feel hard, finding something that makes you feel a bit like a novice again while making it. That’s such an important ingredient and again, it’s about not sticking to a formula. There is a kind of formula in Avatar, I guess, in the sense that our songs tend to have choruses, so that says something about the structure, and as long as it’s called Avatar, it’s going to be some sort of metal and metal is all about the riff. The riff defines the song, and then you take it wherever it needs to go.
But beyond that, we really play with what we can do and what we want to do, and we look for new challenges. A lot of what we do is rooted in very extreme metal, but we’ve taken that in a much more melodic direction. Another big chunk is very traditional heavy metal, but we don’t want to be retro about it. We just really like when musicians actually play their instruments, no drum machines, no sound replacements, no quantizing, no auto tune, none of that stuff that polishes away the DNA. So it’s a bunch of things like that that make us who we are, and all of it feeds into the music.
Having a bit of time now since the album’s come out, and playing it live, and taking it on tour, are you even more proud of what you’ve achieved with that album when you go back and reflect on it?
Good question. I think it’s been pretty even all the way through. I’m grateful it’s been received well, because there’s something about putting an album out, the word is release, right? And release also means letting it go. That happens twice in a band’s life with an album. First, when you listen to the final master, sign off that it sounds good, and finish the recording. At that point, you hand it over to yourself as a performer. The songwriter, the person who made the music with the band is done, so you release it, you let it go.
Then it happens again when you put it out into the world and people get to hear it. That’s another form of letting go, because it’s no longer just your interpretation. If you’ve written songs good enough for people to listen more than once, they start taking on roles in people’s lives, from the everyday things like being someone’s workout soundtrack or party song, to becoming tied to core memories or resonating with something deeply personal. All of that reshapes the story of the songs. I humbly accept that I no longer have the only answer to what the songs are about, nor should I. Seeing that unfold, hearing what the album has meant to people… proud, yes, but more than anything, grateful.
Is it too early to start thinking about what might be album number eleven or is it to early?
Oh, no, I started… we started that, like, ten months ago. It’s too soon to tell anyone exactly what it’s going to be, but that’s part of the process. Like I said, once the songwriter hands the album over to the performer, those are two different art forms and then you’re left with some idle hands, the devil’s plaything and all that, so ideas start bubbling up. You start talking, coming up with concepts, writing new riffs, doodling on napkins. The whole thing starts moving already, and we’ve always been like that.
Interview By Rob Lyon
Catch Avatar on the following dates, tickets from The Phoenix…
