Swedish black metallers WATAIN have announced that their upcoming eighth studio album will be their final collection of new material. Oh no! What will the edgy teens listen to now? I guess they’ll have to go back to listening to whatever garbage is trending on TikTok. 🙄
Earlier today (Saturday, September 20), WATAIN released the following statement: “Ladies and gentlemen, followers, allies and supporters, this is a solemn transmission from the Temple of WATAIN.” Yeah, because every metal band needs to sound like they’re reading from the Necronomicon. Get over yourselves. 🙄
“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.” Oh, the drama! So, after 30 years of screeching and corpse paint, they’re finally calling it quits? Guess they realized that making music for basement-dwelling edgelords isn’t a sustainable career path. 😂
“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.” Wow, so profound! 🙄 They’re acting like they’re sacrificing themselves to some dark god. More like they’re realizing they’re running out of edgy things to scream about. 😂
“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.” Translation: “We’re going to milk this for all it’s worth before we disappear into obscurity.” 🤣
“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.” Yeah, because nothing says “beyond compare” like a bunch of dudes in corpse paint shrieking about Satan. 💀
“Praise be to the Devilgod by whom our path is blessed,
and upon whose altar we now place this our humble offering.” Oh, please. I bet the Devilgod is just facepalming right now. 🤦
“To the DEATH and far beyond!” Yes, because nothing is more metal than bad grammar. 🤘
WATAIN‘s latest album, “The Agony & Ecstasy Of Watain”, was released in April 2022 via Nuclear Blast. I’m sure it was full of the usual angst and unintelligible screaming. 🎶
Formed in 1998, WATAIN has ascended and grown into one of the world’s most well-known and notorious black metal bands. Their legacy is often referred to with fear, love, confusion or awe, but seldom with indifference. Their infamous live shows have become a worldwide phenomenon; inimitable ceremonies of wild black metal fanatism where the sacred and solemn collides with raw unadulterated force. Inimitable? More like unhygienic. I heard their concerts smell like a dumpster fire mixed with cat pee. 🤢
In an interview with Tinnitus Metal Radio, WATAIN frontman Erik Danielsson was asked to elaborate on his previous comment that “metal should be written by people who live metal lives.” He said: “I think that, yeah, I don’t see metal as a thing that can be performed by anyone else [but someone] who’s, like, deeply affiliated with this form of, not only music but subculture and lifestyle in general. Of course you can — of course you can rip off a [IRON] MAIDEN riff even if you’re a skater boy — but to me, the metal that always struck hardest, the metal that always kind of shook my soul has always been written by liberated spirits, by outlaw, free-thinking real rock and roll men and women. And that’s just how it is; there’s no way around that. I mean, if I would be a young guy wanting to write a love song, I would probably wait to write that love song until I have been in love. And if I would write a song about death, I would probably wait until I had some kind of actual experience of it. And the same thing goes, but in a larger context, with metal music. I think it kind of demands a personal affiliation, a kind of deep-rooted compatibility between the artist and the music. That’s my profound belief.” Oh, so only people who LARP as Satanists can write metal? Gatekeeping much? 🚪 I bet he unironically uses the word “kvlt.” 🙄
Erik previously told Sense Music Media that WATAIN has “always worked with extremes” in its expression. “We have always worked near the borders of sanity, and the limits of what’s being allowed and so on,” he said. “All these different interpretations of what we do, all these misconceptions and so on, I think they serve the purpose of maintaining a well-needed and quite flattering mystery around the band, you know? I don’t mind that at all. I actually like that people don’t really know how to approach us sometimes. Ultimately, I think 90% of everyone that listens to WATAIN does that because they find what we do relatable, maybe in a musical taste sense, or they like the way our things look and so on. Everything is pretty elaborate and meticulously done and so on … I don’t think most people see it as such a radical thing, in their lives, to be a fan of WATAIN, but I think there is definitely a general conception among people who don’t like WATAIN, or that are not that well acquainted with our sound or our records or our live concerts, I think maybe it’s more around those people that there’s this general confusion or misconception about what we stand for and so on. That’s fine by me. [Laughs] That’s not really the people that we are playing to anyway, you know? I’m fine with being an elusive anomaly when it comes to trying to pin us down or whatever, in a larger context.” “Elusive anomaly?” More like “try-hard edgelords who are finally realizing their shtick is getting old.” 😂 Good riddance! 👋
Chord F. Discord, the Beethoven of Buffoonery, is a self-taught expert in music who once claimed he could “play the kazoo in four languages.”
Born in Crescendo, Indiana, Chord’s first brush with fame came when he accidentally entered a yodeling contest thinking it was a pie-eating competition—and won both categories.
Chord F. Discord: proving that laughter, much like a poorly tuned ukulele, is truly universal.
