Europe – The Cult of Ignorance

A Swedish rock band that has not released an album in nine years dropped a new single today, named for a 1980 Isaac Asimov essay about anti-intellectualism — and recruited a former World No. 1 tennis player, Sweden’s first astronaut, the frontman of The Hives, and half of Opeth to appear in the music video.

Europe have been gone — by their standards, anyway — for nearly a decade. The Swedish band that turned The Final Countdown into one of the most-recognised rock recordings of the 1980s and have spent the years since quietly recording solid hard rock records for an audience that never quite let them go, released their last studio album in 2017. The hiatus that followed has been the longest of their career. On June 3, 2026, they returned, properly, with The Cult of Ignorance — the second single from the band’s twelfth studio album Come This Madness, due via Silver Lining Music on September 25, 2026, and the most direct statement the five-piece have made about what kind of moment they think they are coming back into.

The title is borrowed from a 1980 Newsweek essay by the science-fiction novelist Isaac Asimov called “A Cult of Ignorance,” a short piece about the rising current of American anti-intellectualism that has been cited so often in the decades since that the phrase has become a kind of shorthand for one of the more durable problems of modern democratic life. Joey Tempest, the band’s frontman, was specific about why the title travelled this far. “I love this track,” he told the press today. “It’s a straightforward rock song with lyrics reflecting the times we live in, written slightly tongue in cheek. The title was inspired by a phrase coined by author and biochemist Isaac Asimov. It reflects some of the negative tendencies emerging in our world today, though it is written in a slightly light-hearted tone.” The song itself was sparked during the band’s most recent South American tour, when keyboardist Mic Michaeli — Europe’s quietest member but arguably their most consistent songwriting partner for Tempest since the mid-1980s — brought a song idea to Tempest in a backstage moment. They finished it together.

Come This Madness was recorded at RMV Studio in Stockholm, a facility founded a few years ago by Benny Andersson of ABBA and his son Ludvig Andersson. The producer is Tom Dalgety, the English producer best known for his work with Royal Blood, Ghost, the Pixies, and a recent stretch of Opeth records. The mixing is by Mike Fraser, who has been working on the loudest rock records made anywhere for thirty years — AC/DC’s Back in Black-era reissues, Aerosmith, Metallica, Van Halen. The combination is unusual for a Europe record. Most of the band’s previous twelve albums have been recorded in-house in Stockholm with Swedish engineers. Come This Madness is, by some distance, the most internationally-staffed studio undertaking the band has attempted.

The music video that has everyone in it

The directed-by credit on the music video that arrived alongside the single belongs to Patric Ullaeus, the Swedish video director who has handled Europe’s clips going back to Not Supposed to Sing the Blues in 2012, and who has also made videos for Dimmu Borgir, In Flames, Sabaton, and most of the bigger acts in modern European metal. The five-minute clip is built around the band performing in a darkened soundstage, intercut with cameos from a guest list that has more or less the entire Swedish entertainment, athletic, and scientific establishment on it. The Hollywood actress Malin Åkerman, known to American audiences from Watchmen and Billions, plays a brief role. Stefan Edberg, the former World No. 1 tennis player and six-time Grand Slam champion, makes an appearance. So does Christer Fuglesang, Sweden’s first astronaut, who completed two NASA Space Shuttle missions in 2006 and 2009. Howling Pelle Almqvist, the frontman of The Hives, turns up. Mikael Åkerfeldt and Fredrik Åkesson of Opeth — the most internationally-celebrated Swedish metal band of the past two decades — both make extended appearances. The Eurodance star E-Type makes a cameo. The press release describes “many other notable personalities from music, film, fashion, sports and science.”

What the video does, beneath the obvious novelty of all those famous faces in the same five minutes, is signal what Europe seem to be quietly trying to do with this comeback. They are reintroducing themselves as a band with roots in a specific national music scene — Swedish rock, broadly defined to include the metal that grew out of the same musical culture, the pop that left the country alongside ABBA two generations ago, even the cross-generational sports and science figures that built Sweden’s modern international identity — rather than just as the band that wrote The Final Countdown forty years ago. The 40th Anniversary tour for that song begins in October across sixteen European cities; the new album follows three weeks before it. Europe are quite plainly playing for the longer game.

The song itself does what Europe songs have always done well. Tempest’s voice sits above a tightly-played four-piece arrangement; the chorus arrives quickly and lodges itself; the lyric is conversational rather than poetic; the production is unfussy and modern without straining after either authenticity or trend. After nine years away, the band sound exactly like themselves. The five members who recorded it — Tempest, founding guitarist John Norum, bassist John Levén, Michaeli on keys, and drummer Ian Haugland — are the same five-piece that has been together, with one short break in the early 1990s, for over forty years. They have not been gone. They have just been waiting. Watch the video.