We sat down with Esa, one of the guitarists of Metal De Facto, at a café in Helsinki and when asked how things were, he told us that he was getting back to life after having been ill for the better part of the week before. And he was hoping really hard that the rest of the band, of which quite a few were ill themselves at the time, were going to get ready for their upcoming release shows.

He’s pretty excited about getting their new album ‘Land of the Rising Sun part 1’ out there into the world, especially since it took way longer than they wanted it to, due to issues like the pandemic and change of vocalist. The overall themes on the album are centered around Japanese culture, with quite a bit of epic samurai tales involved (as to be expected with a power metal band). Japan has such a rich culture, that they had so many songs that they decided to split it up in 2 albums. Esa didn’t remember exactly anymore how they got to Japanese culture to be the theme for the second album because it’s been so long ago, but it’s in a way not too surprising, because in the past, Esa studied Japanese art and music in his university studies. So it came quite natural to him.

Now that they have Aitor as their new vocalist, it’s not as simple anymore to get together as a band to play or record. But he did go to Finland to record his lead vocals, while he did backing vocal lines in his own studio, so all worked out well after all and didn’t change all that much in their recording process after all. They tried a couple of different melodies on this album, where especially the song ‘Heavier than a Mountain’ was a bit of a labor of love. It took a long time for them to figure out how the chorus should be like, but once they figured it out, they were really happy with how it turned out like and became one of Esa’s favorite songs of the album.

With the Japanese theme on this album, they would have loved to bring it visually more live with some spectacular stage production, but sadly they couldn’t find any inflatable samurais that were affordable for their budget. Hopefully in the future they’ll get to a point where they can bring their vision properly to the stage. Talking about their vision, Esa shared that they actually already have a roadmap for the band that goes about 7 albums far. Of course, he didn’t want to go in detail about it, but he could share that they are planning to stick with these kind of historical themes and that for album 7 he has something huge planned. So definitely a lot of things to be looking forward to!

In the weekend of the album release, they’ll do a couple of release shows in Finland and there should be some more shows coming this year, as Esa said that there are some dates in discussion. Hopefully the band can pick the momentum back up they had in the beginning and we can see great things happening for them (and power metal)!

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