WATAIN

In September 2025, black metal band WATAIN announced that their eighth album will be their last and that they will then cease to exist. They gave themselves three years, coinciding with their 30th anniversary, and put it like this: “Rather than being devoured by the jaws of time or crushed on the wheel of circumstance, we choose to let Watain return, unbent and unconquered, to the primordial chaos that once gave it life.”

The Uppsala band took their name from an early recording by the American black metal band Von. Erik Danielsson has sung and played bass from the start, and Pelle Forsberg has played guitar for just as long. They have released seven albums since Rabid Death’s Curse in 2000, and one of them, Lawless Darkness from 2010, earned them a Swedish Grammis for hard rock album of the year, an award black metal usually doesn’t come anywhere near. In 2013, The Wild Hunt went straight to number one on the Swedish album chart, where you usually don’t find this kind of music either.

The reason is that WATAIN has never settled for the raw coldness that otherwise typically defines Nordic black metal. Beneath the noise lie melodies, build-ups and a dramatic arc that make their records something special. And then there is the live experience: WATAIN doesn’t just play concerts, they stage dark rituals with candles and torches, flames, blood, carcasses and incense.

The band are self-declared theistic Satanists, and Danielsson has said that a shared belief is a prerequisite for making something as personal as their music. Whatever you think of that, it means that nobody on that stage is just pretending. They last visited COPENHELL back in 2014, and we look forward to both the reunion and the farewell in 2027.