Avatarium - Between You, God, the Devil and the Dead (2025)

Country: Sweden
Style: Doom Rock
Rating: 8/10
Release Date: 24 Jan 2025
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I found Avatarium last time out, with their fifth album, Death, Where is Your Sting, which was my Album of the Month for December 2022 and one of only nine 9/10s for that year. The curse of the critic (or the DJ) is that we're so tied to the flow of the new that we can't go back to simply enjoy things the way we used to when we were just fans. However, I've absolutely gone back to this one. It's become an old friend now, that I've hauled out in all sorts of places. I've played a lot of pool to it at my son's house. A couple of the songs have lessened a bit over time but A Love Like Ours and Death, Where is Your Sting are as impactful to me now as they were on a stunned first listen. They live rent free in my head. They awe me.

And that's the other reason why I haven't sought out their first four albums yet. Sure, there's the fact that I simply don't have the luxury of time but I'm a little scared to find either that they don't have the same punch or, even worse, that they do. What if I found them at their peak and it's only down from here in either direction? What have I been doing with my life if they've been creating music this special since 2013 and I simply haven't noticed? What does that say about me? Well, it's time to knuckle down and tackle their new one. Did they strike gold twice running?

Well, no, they didn't, but this was still an excellent album on a first listen and, four or five times in, it's continuing to grow on me. Oddly, the killer track isn't right there at the beginning to kick it off. Long Black Waves and I See You Better in the Dark are really good doom rock songs, just not good enough to knock me out the way that the openers on the prior album did. Not that I could give you another one off the top of my head that matched it, but still. It was the third track here, My Hair is on Fire (But I'll Take Your Hand), that blew me away.

It starts out with simplistic piano from Marcus Jidell and the soft voice of Jennie-Ann Smith but in quintessential Avatarium fashion. You could have blindfolded me and asked me who it was and I'd have told you within ten seconds. Then it's an serious ramp up and I'm in absolute heaven. It's not quite A Love Like Ours, perhaps because it doesn't have its quirkiness, but it's the first song here to come close. Jidell and Smith take it home perfectly too. In between, there are some moments where I heard Supertramp and, if you're now imagining some of their classics translated into the doom rock genre, then you're welcome. I'm doing the same thing.

It was my first highlight and it remains my top pick, but there are a few serious growers here that are coming very close indeed. They didn't grab me on a first time through, maybe not on a second either, but the more I listen the better they get and the more I fall into them and lose myself.

"The heart wants what the heart wants", says Lovers Give a Kingdom to Each Other. What I think my heart wants is to stay in that song. It's only five minutes long but, every time I hear it, it takes my life over for what feels like half an hour. It's not that it drags, it's that it captivates me almost like a hypnotic spell and time slows down so I can attempt to grab it in return. I still haven't quite managed it but I'm willing to keep trying for as long as it takes. Somehow, it's a comfort zone of a song, while also being willing to torment. The tail of the song has a similar groove to a Fleetwood Mac song like The Chain, when they keep layering on emphasis but refuse to escalate.

Until Forever and Again has a similar effect, though it's easier to focus on it. The riff is golden and the guitar laid over it is even better. Smith hits some tasty escalations too and there's a gorgeous drop five minutes in. I adore Avatarium the most when they're doing something minimal like this but then crash back into doom with the sort of effortless transition that other bands would kill for. There's plenty of minimal in the title track, which closes things out this time, enough that we can hear a tiny recurrent squeak that could be something as minor as a microphone stand that needs oiling. This one teases its escalations and takes longer to deliver them, but they arrive. It isn't up there with my highlights yet, but it tells me that it may get there next.

Then again, anything might. Long Black Waves is the closest they get to Candlemass, their parent band of sorts, and there's some tasty guitar and textbook escalations. I See You Better in the Dark has a bluesy feel to it with plenty of hard rock. It could be a Pat Benatar song, of all things. Being with the Dead ramps up the guitar fuzz and stays in the doom rock style. Notes from Underground is the odd man out here because it's a relatively short instrumental, but the handheld percussion that kicks it off carries on audibly under the guitar and regular drums, even once it finds its way to a guitar solo and a heavier riff. Any one of them could grow.

So this is an 8/10 from me for now. It was a 7/10 on a first listen but it keeps growing and it's done that solidly enough and consistently enough to warrant an added point. It hasn't reached the 9/10 that its predecessor earned yet, but I'm interested to see if it'll get there. It doesn't seem like it's got the same peaks but it does feel like it's a little more consistent across the whole album. Let's revisit down the road.

Avatarium - Death, Where is Your Sting (2022)

Country: Sweden
Style: Doom Rock/Metal
Rating: 9/10
Release Date: 21 Oct 2022
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OK, here's a surprise for me! I enjoyed Jennie-Ann Smith's guest appearance on the recent album by Candlemass and noticed that her own band, Avatarium, had a new album out too, so I thought I should check it out. I saw that they were a fellow Swedish doom metal band, so the natural instinct was to expect some sort of similarity in sound, just with a female vocalist and that's not what this is at all. Sure, there's unmistakably doom in their sound and there's a weight to what they do that often feels heavy, but this is a rock album far more than it is a metal album.

However, rock just doesn't cut it. Is there a genre called doom rock that isn't goth, because this is certainly not goth, even with the prominent use of cello on the opening track. What do occult and pagan rock become if a band isn't owned by those themes? This isn't folky enough to become just folk, but that component can't be ignored. Is it simply alternative rock? Surely not, because that's laden with a whole slew of implications that just don't apply here. I have no idea what to call what Avatarium do, except something that I utterly adore. This speaks to me in ways that precious few albums have this year.

A Love Like Ours is slow and deliberate, somewhere between Hexvessel and the Bad Seeds, with a delightful cello from Marcus Jidell who's primarily the band's guitarist, a beautifully distant beat from Andreas Johansson and an aching vocal delivery from Smith. It's so immediately a highlight that I only got one more song into the album before I had to jump back to this one again. And that next song, the title track, is a highlight too, which is more urgent and adds an alt country vibe, not that alt country ever sounded this ominous or this smooth. Smith turns up the ache to remind me of a singer/songwriter called Natalie Farr, who seems to be a lot more obscure than I thought she was. She sounded like this on an excellent indie album called Swept.

And then Avatarium turn up the doom, because Stockholm opens like Black Sabbath covered by an unusual folk band who then drift into something a lot lighter and looser. At its lightest, it feels like it has a psychedelic flower power influence, not unlike Children of the Sün, but at its heaviest, it's a driving occult rock standard. Psalm for the Living is the lightest song on offer, a cross between a hymn and a Stevie Nicks ballad, but with a dark cloud floating around above everything. It may not be doom in genre but it's doom in feel.

God is Silent, on the other hand, is emphatically doom and is as heavy as this album gets, even if I can't call the sound particularly dense. This is surely metal, even if the album hasn't been up until this point. Nocturne is clearly metal too, a doomy chugger of a song with clean vocals soaring over the riffs with a perfect knowledge of when to add a hint of vocal fry. Transcendent becomes metal in its midsection, but it's psychedelic folk before and after, ably highlighting just how effortlessly this band shifts genres in ways that shouldn't work but emphatically do, every time.

This is such a good album that I actually dreaded it continuing because surely the next song wasn't going to be up to the same standard as the last one. Maybe it finally reached that point in Mother Can You Hear Me Now, because I felt myself returning to reality a little after being shook during a killer five track stretch, but it's still a damn good song that's elevated in its second half by a Jidell solo that shows how much he's been listening to Dave Gilmour and also truly learning what makes his solos special rather than just mimicking them.

I haven't heard Avatarium before, but this is their fifth album and it seems that they've moved to this sound over time. I understand that they were founded by Leif Edling, as a side project that he had hoped to work with Opeth's Mikael Åkerfeldt, a dream pairing if ever I saw one. However, the latter was unavailable so Edling proceeded anyway, bringing in Marcus Jidell of Soen and his wife, Jennie-Ann Smith. I still need to explore their back catalogue but it seems that they were initially doom metal through and through, but have diversified their sound over time.

What that suggests to me is that the admirable range exhibited here—none of these songs sounds like any other, but every one of them feels consistent in this company—is something that's still in the process of being explored. I have a feeling I'm going to like their previous four albums, two of them with Edling and two of them without, but I'm going to like their next one even more. It's fair to say that this was a rare 9/10 from me on a first listen but it doesn't lose any of its power after a repeat or six. It just provides us an opportunity to focus on details like the cymbal sound on A Love Like Ours, the delicious shifts in emphasis on many of these tracks and how well Mats Rydström is able to underpin crucial moments. There's a lot here. Relish it.