Fremont Street in the heart of Downtown Las Vegas hits like a neon blast to the cortex. Casino bulbs scream in unison as the canopy above vomits light in a permanent sunrise. Tourists, hustlers, locals and freaks churn together while showgirls, dudes in gorilla costumes and muscle-bound Marines hoist giggling visitors for tip-jar selfies.
Anywhere else, five Swedes in warpaint and black PVC outfits that look like they belong to some dark circus would draw some perplexed stares. Here, they’re just another attraction moving with the current.
“There’s a guy here who you can pay five dollars to kick in the crotch,” says Avatar singer Johannes Eckerström, one of the men in black. “No cup, no nothing. There’s no trick or gag to it. It’s a vibe!”
Article continues belowAvatar have rolled into Vegas as part of their winter US tour. It comes on the back of a stellar few months that have seen them support Iron Maiden in Europe and release their 10th album, Don’t Go In The Forest, which goes for the commercial jugular like nothing they’ve done before.
This year is shaping up to be equally eventful, with the band set to support Metallica at four massive stadium shows. The week before we meet, a billboard advertising the band appeared in New York’s Times Square – among the most expensive advertising real estate in America. Twenty years into the grind, Avatar look suspiciously like a band knocking on the door of the big time.
This evening, they’ll play a sold-out show at the Brooklyn Bowl. But right now they’ve hit the streets for a photo session. Hammer’s snapper, Jonathan, works fast, posing the band against signs and the electric sky. Then he spots a break in the traffic. The band plant themselves on the yellow line running up the centre of the road. Thirty seconds later, he’s done, and the band turn for the kerb as the cars at the red light rev their engines.
No one notices the Vespa roaring down the bike lane, certainly not Johannes, who has looked away for a brief second. The rider has seen him, but that doesn’t stop him from waiting until the very last second to hit the horn – there’s no braking for pedestrians in Vegas, only velocity and disdain. Just as it looks like the scooter is about to collide with Johannes, he pivots hard and the bike scythes past. It misses him by six inches, maybe less. The rider doesn’t even look back.
Everyone exhales and Johannes laughs with the relief of a man who has just dodged a bullet. Or at least a vehicle travelling at high speed. Er, Johannes, you nearly died, Hammer says to him. How do you feel?
He grins. “Alive.”
Sin City is a chrome hallucination running on faded hope and bad decisions. Heat slicks the towering palm fronds like axle grease, glittered conventioneers spill from rideshares with lanyards and White Claw breath, and Las Vegas Strip has moulted into a polished steel centipede of scaffolding for next week’s Formula One race.
“Las Vegas feels strangely familiar,” says Johannes, savouring the madness of the city. “I’m not necessarily a Vegas person, but when you travel across the US, this is a natural pit stop. We come in here on a pirate ship and wreak havoc.”
When Hammer meets the band – Johannes, plus guitarists Jonas Jarlsby and Tim Öhrström, bassist Henrik Sandelin and drummer John Alfredsson – they’ve just wrapped up a meet and greet, which they’ve conducted in matching black terrycloth robes, like five Hugh Hefners from the Seventh Circle Of Hell, while flanked by a heavy, shirtless guy in a gimp mask. Because, well, Vegas.
“Avatar is extremely independent and Las Vegas is extremely corporate,” Johannes says of the distinction between the showmanship for which the city is known, and the performance the band will deliver tonight.
The retina-searing supernova of multicoloured lights and constant background ching of slot machines and blackjack tables is certainly a long way from Gothenburg, where Avatar formed in the first half of the 2000s. Their early albums owed a debt to their city’s 90s melodeath scene, and they remained make-up free for their first decade. But with their carnival-ringmaster attire and theatricality, the Avatar of 2025 now have something of the larger-than-life air of Vegas.
Don’t Go In The Forest retains some of their old edge, but it’s bigger, bolder, brighter than anything they’ve made before – less dingy underground club, more Las Vegas Strip at midnight. Johannes doesn’t flinch at the word ‘accessible’.
“To me that means ‘well-articulated’,” he points out. “The album still has a bunch of death metal riffs. ‘Accessibility’ is where you’re able to put your point across as a songwriter and a performer. It can also mean milquetoast or blandness, or you’ve tried to polish down the edges, which we haven’t.”
Away from the stage, Johannes is polite, measured, almost studious. He says he sees no difference between the version of himself offstage and the larger-than-life ringmaster onstage.
“No, it’s all one,” he says. “This is an opportunity to express myself freely, rather than turning into something. It’s a different focus, rather than a change.”
Whereas some bands like their dressing rooms to be off-limits to journalists, Avatar make Hammer welcome in their inner sanctum in the Brooklyn Bowl. An Alice In Chains album plays through the speakers, but the band themselves largely sit in silence – not out of frostiness, more due to the fact Johannes, John, Jonas and Henrik have been playing together for close to 25 years and have spent countless hours hanging around in dressing rooms like this, and have probably had every conceivable conversation a hundred times over. (Second guitarist Tim is a relative new boy, with a mere 14 years under his belt.)
“We were in the middle of puberty when we started together,” Johannes jokes. “Very early on, we came together as what was Avatar. We really grew up with each other, and we’ve always been able to redefine what this all means to us, and where our values align. You can boil it down to a short list: we want to write and perform our own material. That’s it.”
Avatar’s journey has been a long, slow one. It’s at odds with today’s culture of instant gratification, where whole careers could be assembled in a summer, then dismantled by autumn’s algorithm. They did things the old-fashioned way, hauling amps into community halls, playing for gas money and beer. But Johannes is clear-eyed about their journey to this point.
“When Paul McCartney was 24, he did Sgt. Pepper,” he says. “But that was a different time and our genre operates differently. It’s a more meticulous journey, where nothing really blows up anymore, with a few exceptions, but even those few exceptions struggle to last. It’s usually the turtle rather than the hare that survives.”
If he makes it sound like it’s been easy, it hasn’t. Johannes was 24 when Avatar broke up. There were no ultimatums, no drama, no shitflinging in the press. In fairness, the split lasted all of 15 minutes. Yet it proved to be the most pivotal moment of the band’s history.
“We had hit a certain age where we started to feel ancient – 24. It was a proper quarter-life crisis,” Johannes says. “John and I were sitting in the space where we used to write… He comes in and I hit play and it sucked. It was a bad day.”
The two men cracked opened a beer. For the first time, it dawned on them what they’d sacrificed for the band.
“Our friends had degrees or jobs, two ties and a shiny car. It was like, ‘Oh, shit…’ There was that sense of missing the bus,” says Johannes. “Things hadn’t happened the way we thought they were supposed to happen. So John and I started talking about alternative careers. We left the band for about 15 minutes.”
Before they turned off the lights on Avatar for good, they decided it would be a damn shame if they didn’t finish the song they’d been working on. Somehow, the creative floodgates reopened. Maybe Avatar wasn’t done after all. The song they resurrected that day, Dying To See You Dead, ended up as a bonus track on their fourth album, 2012’s Black Waltz. That record became their first to be released in North America.
“After all these years of doing our homework in Europe, and now four albums deep, we finally had the songs and we grew into a bigger idea of what Avatar was,” says Johannes. “So we were way more equipped to blow America away on the first attempt, and then Europe eventually caught up. We had to travel all the way over here and then crawl back east to make things work for us.”
Fourteen years on, Don’t Go In The Forest is still recognisable as Avatar, but its commercial gleam and big choruses suggest an ambition that has never been there before. A cynic might call it desperation, a last roll of the dice. But it’s more accurate to say that it’s just the latest move by a band whose durability and willingness to evolve have proven to be their greatest strengths.
“It comes down to persistence,” Johannes says. “It’s all about proving ourselves, step-by-step, and it was a long time coming.”
Certainly, opening for Iron Maiden last year (round two after the 2022 Brazil dates) and Metallica this year (stepping onto their round stage for a run of stadium shows) isn’t luck so much as proof-of-concept. Opening for big bands with such partisan audiences has been the downfall of many groups. However, Avatar merely see it as a challenge to be met head-on.
“Once, at the beginning, we played Liverpool and there were six people in the audience,” Johannes remembers. “I was ecstatic, because there was one more in the audience than onstage. So you’ve got this vision – how do you make something so small feel so big? You do that for a few years and you get pretty good at it, and suddenly you reach bigger rooms. And now the challenge becomes, ‘How do you make something so big feel small?’”
Rob, the band’s English tour manager, suddenly pops his head into the room to say that our transport is here to take us to the photoshoot on Fremont Street. And it’s there, thanks to a guy on a Vespa scooter, that Avatar’s journey very nearly comes to a messy end on the Las Vegas sidewalk.
Back at the venue, with everyone undamaged and in one piece, it’s the quiet before the storm. Johannes sits in the corner, headphones on, warming up by singing soul classics playing through his laptop. Henrik slaps his bass on a sofa. Jonas and Tim stretch out and John steals a last pre-show plate of food. Sex, drugs and rock’n’roll is conspicuously absent.
“There is no rock-star excess,” Johannes confirms. “Very early on, we recognised that we’re not rock stars, we’re metalheads. I remember the first time there was beer backstage, in Copenhagen, and we were like, ‘We made it!’ It was a bag of crisps and all the beer we could drink. ‘We’re famous now!’ Except there was no one there.”
At 9:15, the curtain drops and Avatar stride out onto the Brooklyn Bowl stage. Nearly a third of their 18-song set comes from Don’t Go In The Forest, and the room treats those tracks like old friends, bellowing every chorus as if they’d known them for years. There’s a brief, mid-set period of respite as Johannes sits at the piano, a hush descending. But then it’s back into their thunderous, theatrical assault before they take their final bow to a rapturous response.
Tomorrow, Avatar will leave the blinding neon lights of Vegas behind them for their next stop on this tour. Bigger stages await – enormous ones, in the case of those upcoming Metallica support slots in the summer. But despite all of that, Johannes Eckerström remains grounded.
“We’ve been able to play all of these countries, hang out at a hotel pool in Chile one day, then dig our way out of a snowstorm in Eastern Europe another day… That sounds like a good life to me. As long as we write and perform the music and keep the brotherhood intact, we’ll take this as far as it goes.”
Don't Go Into The Forest is out now via Thirty Tigers. Avatar play Sonic Temple in May and support Metallica in the UK and Ireland in June and July.
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