Avatar have unveiled a new documentary, Scaling The Mountain, detailing the ideas behind and making of their Hunter Gatherer album.
The footage for the documentary was filmed across the past two years as the Swedes worked on the album, which was released by eOne on August 7.
“You must ask yourself, over and over, what do you want, what are you trying to accomplish, why?” says frontman Johannes Eckerström in the introduction to the documentary. “In the beginning it was very simple: monkey see, monkey do: grow your hair, learn to tune a guitar, bang your head… that part actually never changed. We’re loud monkeys, screaming, scaling the mountain, hoping to get as loud as those before us. We’re metalheads, and it wasn’t just a phase. Still, you get older, and things get more complicated… If we are to earn our time on the mountain top, our screams need to add something to the conversation.”
Speaking with Metal Hammer earlier in the year, Eckerström had this to say about the ideas behind Hunter Gatherer: “The planet’s on fire, the oceans are dying, birds are eating plastic caps from toothpaste tubes… we are in a mess. And we are in this mess while living in this weird, digital, high-tech, material gilded cage… very, very detached from what evolution made us out to be. And we are still exactly the same animal. We haven’t had time to adapt to what we’ve built around us. So the album deals with what it means to be homo sapiens, with our understanding of that in this world we have built for ourselves.”
Hunter Gatherer, the follow-up to the Swedes’ 2018 album Avatar Country, was produced by Jay Ruston , and features a cameo from Corey Taylor, whistling on A Secret Door. “It was, ‘We've got this big star, let’s do something completely unexpected and not obvious’,” says Eckerström.
