Johannes Eckerström says Metallica‘s praise felt like a teenage daydream, and that James Hetfield watched Avatar‘s set night after night.
Avatar spent roughly a quarter of a century without hearing anything like it from the bands they grew up on. Johannes Eckerström reckons that was probably for the best.
The Avatar frontman was asked by Andrew Slaidins on The Rockpit‘s “50 Shades Of Slaids” for his reaction to Metallica publicly crediting the Swedes with raising the bar during the spring and summer European leg of the “M72” world tour. The praise had come in an Instagram post.
Metallica wrote at the time: “Ringmaster Johannes and the Swedish madmen from @avatarmetal brought something completely new to the #M72 stage. Every night felt like a spectacle. Massive thanks for raising the bar and keeping crowds across Europe and the UK on their toes!”
Eckerström‘s responded (as transcribed by Blabbermouth): “Well, we spent a couple of decades not getting very loud, amazing public praise from our childhood heroes, which I think is healthy. So the fundamentals of what we build our confidence on and our drive on lies elsewhere. That being said, it’s a total bizarre childhood dream version of success to have it. It really brings me back to — the kind of happiness I felt for it is this almost, as an adult, goofy…”
Then he traced it back to being 14 years old at his first proper hard rock show.
“I remember my first real hard rock concert was, I was 14,” he continued. “I went with a friend to see AC/DC. And with that came these daydreams of, what if we would meet? What if they would think I’m cool? Like meeting your heroes and then having this exaggerated version of how nice they would be to you kind of thing. Like going back to maybe how I would have thought of Michael Jackson when I was nine or whatever. And that was kind of what the Metallica thing now felt like. Because [the] first show [we played as the support act for Metallica], yeah, we got a cake, a signed card, and got to meet two of [the members of Metallica] briefly, and we thought, ‘Oh, this is so cool. Doesn’t get better than this.’ But then they stepped it up show after show. We were invited. We got to meet more and interact more, and James [Hetfield] was out there checking out our set, enjoying it, came back for more the second day, the third day. [He] really seemed to truly dig what we’re doing.”
He closed on the version of himself that got the most out of it.
“You can’t build a band around hoping that one of your heroes will end up being a fan for it, but when it happens, like, again, it’s… I don’t know. It feels like sometimes that we grow trees in layers, and somewhere hidden inside of us is whoever we were in the past. That never goes fully away, and it reached through the layers, and there’s some guys in their early teens who had an amazing summer now with Metallica.”
The band had responded to the compliment in July with a statement to Loudwire: “Metallica has always been an inspiration, so sharing those stages with them and having them recognize what we bring as a band, is something we will always be grateful for. They’ve set the standard for live performance for generations, and hearing them say that we brought something new to the ‘M72‘ stage and helped raise the bar means the world to us. This last month has been a wild ride and we’re incredibly grateful for every moment.”
Metallica announced the 2026 European stadium run in May 2025 with Avatar alongside Gojira, Pantera and Knocked Loose. Avatar‘s last night on the bill was in London. The “M72” tour itself finished on July 5 after eight legs and 99 shows, with Metallica now turning to a Las Vegas Sphere residency.
Avatar, Eckerström, guitarists Jonas Jarlsby and Tim Öhrström, bassist Henrik Sandelin and drummer John Alfredsson, formed in Gothenburg in 2001. Their tenth album, Don’t Go In The Forest, came out on Halloween last year through Black Waltz Records, the band’s own imprint. It followed 2023’s Dance Devil Dance, which gave them a first Billboard Mainstream Rock Airplay number one in “The Dirt I’m Buried In“.
