Speaking about “Don’t Go In The Forest” as a whole, 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.”

The track listing for “Don’t Go In The Forest” will be revealed in due course.

The band has previously shared the songs “Captain Goat” and “In The Airwaves”, both of which will also appear on “Don’t Go In The Forest”.

In a recent interview with Nic and Big J of the Boise, Idaho radio station 100.3 The X Rocks, Eckerström stated about AVATAR‘s upcoming LP: “It’s our tenth album. That’s a high number, and I don’t think many bands on purpose would phone it in at this point. But I think certainly there’s a risk of taking things for granted. And maybe just looking at the trip that we had to make to make this album and to have it make sense making an album, it can be harder and therefore more important than ever the further you go to find a reason, why is this important to us right now? Why does this one matter to us? Why does it matter to us to get to do another one? What do we wanna put on there that we are really passionate about right here right now? And I think we nailed that.

“I’m trying to think about the different songs and different directions it goes,” Johannes continued. “There are all these things that we haven’t done before. I get to pretend that I’m Elton John, meaning that I’ve been playing a bit of piano. But now I get to do it while drums are being played, so I feel I’m in the band — finally, after all these years, I’m in the band. So that’s something. And work with outside musicians for stuff, orchestral things and all that, taking that to the next level. I don’t think this is a prog album, really, but some of our most clearly progressive parts ever are probably on this album.

“An ethos I had for a while, a mantra almost going around was when writing to make the choices and also about what to write and stuff is just trust what’s beautiful,” he explained. “‘Cause I believe the subconscious speaks whatever needs to actually say that might not make sense at the given moment when you’re doing it, but if you find it beautiful as you create it, once upon revisiting, it’s very likely to mean exactly what it needed to mean. So there’s a dream factor to this album, letting the subconscious speak through imagery that I picked up in dreams. There’s a surrealness to it, therefore. And all these groovy, lofty words being said on something that is between 40 and 45 minutes of kick-ass heavy metal and hopefully always with ambition forever and ever and ever when it’s AVATAR that it’s songs that you haven’t heard yet.”