Aviana

A band that dismantled itself

Aviana formed in Gothenburg in 2016 as a conventional five-piece: Marcus Vik on vocals, Marcus Heffler and Oscar Forsman on guitars, Sebastian Colque on bass and Niclas Bergström on drums. The debut album Polarize followed in 2017, after which Vik left and Joel Holmqvist — previously of the Swedish band Walking with Strangers — took over as vocalist.

The bigger rupture came in 2020, when Heffler, Forsman, Colque and Bergström all departed at once, leaving Holmqvist as the only official member. Rather than announce four replacements, he introduced three musicians credited solely as Death, Fear and Dark, who play masked and have held those roles since. Published credits disagree slightly on who plays what — some list two guitars and drums, a reviewer in New York in March 2026 had it as guitar, bass and drums — which is the point of the arrangement.

The practical result is that Aviana now functions as Holmqvist's studio project with a fixed anonymous touring unit around it. Writers covering 2026 shows still single out the fact that his is the only face visible on stage, which means the format has survived six years without wearing thin as a gimmick.

The records behind the mask

Epicenter, released in August 2019, moved the band onto the German label Arising Empire, which has been their home ever since. The albums that followed were spaced out by a deliberate run of short releases: the Overcome EP in November 2021, then Obsession and Transcendent in 2022. That sequence kept new music appearing while the line-up around Holmqvist was being rebuilt, and two of those EP-era songs — Obsession and Anomaly — have become the most-played items in the live set, with each logged more than a hundred times.

Corporation arrived in September 2022 as the third album. Then came a long drip of singles rather than another record: As Above, So Below in September 2023, Delirium in October 2024, Father in November 2024, Storm Ablaze in January 2025 and Evermore in August 2025. By the time the fourth album was announced, a third of it was already public.

VOID

VOID came out through Arising Empire at the end of October 2025, with press notices dated 1 November. The running order is Iter Incipere, Into the Void, Father, Heavenly Sparks, Delirium, In Continua Iter, Storm Ablaze, Evermore and World Pulse, the last of these featuring Eddie Berg of Imminence on vocals and violin. Latin-titled instrumental passages bracket the record, continuing the narrative framing the band has used across its artwork and videos.

The subject matter is death and bereavement, and Holmqvist has tied it to losing family members while he was away touring. MetalTalk's review treated it as a step up rather than a holding pattern — an album that confirms the band's ambition and sharpens its place in modern metalcore — and noted the swings between chaotic heaviness and quieter, synth-led stretches.

The album was launched live at The Dome in London on 7 November 2025, the opening night of a European headline run that the label billed as the band's largest to that point.

2026: a year of opening slots

The Silence Follows Tour has defined the year. Currents and ERRA co-headlined a 32-date North American run from 6 March at Nevermore in Baltimore to 19 April at the Vibes Event Center in San Antonio, with Caskets and Aviana opening every night. Reviewers caught the band early in that routing: at Town Ballroom in Buffalo on 18 March, where the opening set drew circle pits and a wall of death, and at Irving Plaza in New York on 21 March, where the write-up focused on the masked players and credited the set with doing its job for the headliners.

Between legs there were festival and club dates. Aviana played Louder Than Life at the Kentucky Exposition Center in Louisville on Sunday 20 September 2026, the day Tool and Gojira headlined. A short American club run followed at the turn of the month: recordBar in Kansas City on 30 September, Reggies in Chicago on 1 October, Detroit on 2 October and New Kensington, Pennsylvania on 3 October.

The tour then crossed to Europe. The band opened at TivoliVredenburg in Utrecht on 2 November 2026, with Carlswerk Victoria in Cologne on 6 November — doors at 17:00 for an 18:00 start, one of six German dates — the O2 Forum Kentish Town in London on 15 November, and Astra Kulturhaus in Berlin on 24 November. Prague on 17 November, Vienna on 22 November and Munich on 23 November sit in the same stretch, alongside UK stops in Bristol, Glasgow, Manchester, Leeds and Wolverhampton.

Where that leaves them

Nothing new has been released since VOID, and the band's visible activity is touring on it. The next confirmed block is North American: Northlane's Anemoia Tour from 12 February 2027 at Ace of Spades in Sacramento through to mid-March, with Allt and Reliqa also on the bill — House of Blues in Anaheim on 13 February, White Oak Music Hall in Houston on 18 February, Orlando on 20 February, The Masquerade in Atlanta on 21 February, Charlotte on 23 February and Baltimore Soundstage on 24 February among them. Listings aggregators currently count 33 upcoming Aviana shows across Europe and North America.

Taken together, that is two consecutive years spent on other people's tours in 600- to 2,000-capacity rooms, which is where the band's audience growth is actually happening rather than on the release schedule. Aviana get filed next to Currents, Silent Planet, Kingdom of Giants and Bleed From Within, and the Silence Follows bill put three of that tier on one stage.

The open question is whether the project converts opening slots into headline rooms of its own outside the Arising Empire heartlands of Germany, the Netherlands and the UK, where the VOID tour of late 2025 already worked. The masked line-up means there is no obvious ceiling imposed by personnel; the constraint is release cadence, and on past form the next record is unlikely to arrive before a long run of singles has gone out first.