Swedish black metal act Watain have announced that they will disband following their next album.
The band shared the news with fans via a Facebook statement, outlining a plan to release their eighth studio album three years from now before calling it quits. The record will coincide with their 30th anniversary.
The group’s statement reads:
“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!”
Formed in 1998, Watain have maintained a reputation as one of the most extreme “orthodox black metal” acts, a sub-genre that heavily incorporates theistic Satanism into lyrics and imagery.
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The band’s live shows became notorious for their ritual-like atmosphere and sense of danger, often involving pyrotechnics, Satanic iconography, and animal blood and bones. One infamous 2014 concert in Brooklyn generated headlines after Watain spewed the audience with animal blood — apparently a common occurrence at their shows at the time — causing some fans to vomit.
Controversy has followed Watain throughout their career, including accusations of animal abuse and affiliations with the NSBM (National Socialist Black Metal) scene. However, frontman Erik Danielsson has been openly critical of Antisemitism and far-right ideologies in heavy metal, telling Invisible Oranges in 2014: “That is the one thing you cannot glorify. The Anti-Semitic and right-wing conservative connections that people have long accused black metal to be a platform for have very little to do with what we stand for.”
In recent years, the band has faced visa issues due in part to its notorious history. In 2019, guitarist Pelle Forsberg was denied entry into the US and forced off a tour “based on Google searches and content on his phone (‘of motorbikes, hunting and various things related to Satanism, Black Metal and counter culture in general’),” according to a statement from the band. Later, in 2022, the band dropped off a tour with Mayhem due to work visa issues.
Watain most recently released the 2022 album The Agony & Ecstasy of Watain, followed by an accompanying live record, Die in Fire – Live in Hell (Agony and Ecstasy Over Stockholm), a year later.
See the band’s full statement regarding its future disbandment below.