“To the DEATH and far beyond!”: This iconic black metal band have announced they’re splitting up – but not before one final album

2025 is the year of the long goodbye. Megadeth announced their upcoming seventeenth album will be their last, Sepultura are midway through an 18-month-long farewell tour, UK stoner warhorses Orange Goblin will take their final bow at the end of the year, and Brit ragers Svalbard gave notice that they’ll be shutting up shop in 2026.

Now we can add Watain to that list. The Swedish black metal furies have revealed that their next album will be their last.

The band, who have been fronted by vocalist and bassist Erik Danielsson since they formed in 1998, plan to drop one more studio album before splitting up in 2028 – the 30th anniversary of their inception.

They revealed the news via a long and very Watain-esque statement, accompanied by some really sad music.

It read: “Ladies and gentlemen, followers, allies and supporters, this is a solemn transmission from the Temple of Watain.

"We hereby announce that in III years’ time – upon our 30th anniversary – Watain's eighth and final full-length album will be released.

“The album will mark the closure of a thirty-year-long magical Work, the last crossroad of Watain, after which the band will cease to exist.

“The ending of a triad of decades during which we have shared our sacred path through this strange world with you, our loyal audience, on a steady course towards the beckoning darkness of The End.

“Over the course of the next three years, the reasons for this will be spoken of and accounted for. But for now we just want to say this: Have our songs and our art not always dealt with finitude and mortality, with DEATH and the beyond?

“Now it is time to claim our own conclusion, and shape it as we have shaped our stage and our songs, in the fires of will. Instead of being consumed by the jaws of time, or broken upon the wheel of circumstance, we choose to let Watain return, unbowed and undefeated, back into the primordial chaos that once gave it life.

“And so we stand on the threshold to our final chapter, and III years of Work remain. III liminal years in the borderlands between the living and the dead, during which new music will be written and shared, concerts will take place, and other things, that will be revealed in due time, will emanate, with the certainty of DEATH, from the Temple of Watain.

“Take this message not as a farewell, but as the first note of a sacrificial requiem, as well as your invitation to partake in shaping these last years into something beyond compare.

“Praise be to the Devilgod by whom our path is blessed, and upon whose altar we now place this our humble offering.

“To the DEATH and far beyond!”

The band have released seven albums to date, the most recent of which, The Agony & Ecstasy Of Watain, came out in 2022. There’s no news on when their final album will come out or when their farewell shows will take place.

Ironically, when Metal Hammer spoke to Erik in 2022, he was insistent that Watain weren’t going anywhere.

“I don’t know if I’ll be doing Watain shows when I’m 70,” he said. “Not the way we’re doing them now. But I think that Watain as a life path and an artistic endeavour will be with me until I die.”