Swedish black metal collective WATAIN have issued a solemn declaration: the band will release its eighth and final full-length album in 2028, marking their 30th anniversary and bringing their three-decade-long journey to a close.
In a statement released from the “Temple of Watain,” the band described the upcoming album as the conclusion of a “thirty-year-long magical Work” and confirmed that after its release, WATAIN will cease to exist.
“Have our songs and our art not always dealt with finitude and mortality, with DEATH and the beyond?” the band wrote. “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.”
Over the next three years, WATAIN promises new music, concerts, and other as-yet-unrevealed offerings that will serve as the band’s final chapter before they return “unbowed and undefeated, back into the primordial chaos that once gave it life.”
The statement closes with an invitation to fans: “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.”
WATAIN’s seventh album, The Agony & Ecstasy of Watain, was released in 2022 to critical acclaim. The forthcoming record will be their last, sealing the band’s legacy as one of the most notorious and uncompromising forces in modern black metal.