We ended up talking with Jarkko “Jerry” Koukonen (vocals), Jarkko Hyvönen (drums) and Lauri Silvonen (rhythm guitars), and started off with a bit of reminiscing about how awesome of a year they’ve already had at this point, with some pretty epic shows like opening for Nightwish at one of their last shows outside of Finland, and getting to play at Summerbreeze.

But we quite quickly dive into the new album ‘How’s The Heart?’, we immediately establish how they’ve stepped up their game again with this album. Where there are quite a couple of new sounds and surprises to be found, which Lauri believes stems from the fact that the group is very much open to new ideas and daring to leave something out when it maybe doesn’t feel right. At this point, they have the confidence to dare to say “hey, let’s just let this be and leave room for something else”.  They never really set out from the beginning that they wanted to do something different, it just ended up happening because of that openness. We briefly touch on the fact that Jarkko‘s vocals have evolved quite a bit again, with him using more of his clean vocals, about which he was saying that somehow he actually found his confidence in it, and actually enjoys it more now. And through those clean vocals, some of his harsh vocals stand out even more, where in some tracks he found some new extremes again, basically venturing into deathcore at some point.

They also talk about how not everything they do necessarily gets received as well (like for instance people complaining about the lack of guitars in the title track), but they feel that’s just the nature of the game and are really proud about what they accomplished on this album. The album is about 10 tracks, but comes with a couple of bonus tracks, which was for them important to keep the flow of the album natural and engaging. But those bonus tracks were still very solid songs that they didn’t want to keep from their fans.

Considering live shows, we know already about Tuska next summer and now still their own curated festival Black Box Mikkeli (happening in the weekend of October 27-28), but for the rest we’ll have to keep our eyes out for news!

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