Children of Bodom: A Finnish Farewell

A year ago today, on 29 December 2020, Alexi Laiho died at his home in Helsinki. He was 41. His management confirmed weeks later that the cause was degeneration of the liver and pancreas connected to long-term alcohol use. For a generation of guitar players he was the closest thing extreme metal had to a Malmsteen with a blast beat, and his band — Children of Bodom — had already played their last show a year before that, so the news landed as a double loss: first the group, then the man who was its whole reason to exist.

This is a retrospective, written from the record and from memory, twelve months into a world without him. I want to get the man’s guitar legacy right, because it deserves better than the sad footnote about how he died.

Espoo kids with impossible fingers

Children of Bodom began in Espoo, just west of Helsinki, in 1993, when Laiho and drummer Jaska Raatikainen formed a band first called Inearthed. They took the Bodom name from Lake Bodom, the site of an infamous unsolved 1960 killing of three teenage campers — a bit of local grim folklore that suited the music perfectly. The classic line-up settled with keyboardist Janne Wirman, whose duels with Laiho became the band’s signature, plus a rhythm section that swung and hammered in equal measure.

What arrived on records like Something Wild (1997), Hatebreeder (1999) and the breakthrough Follow the Reaper (2000) was a genuinely new blend. Laiho married the melodic-death vocabulary coming out of Scandinavia to full-blown neoclassical shred — sweep-picked arpeggios, harmonic-minor runs, the whole Yngwie playbook — and then handed the melodic lead lines to a keyboard as often as a guitar. Wirman would answer a Laiho run with an organ line, the two racing each other up the scale, and the effect was flashy, funny and thrilling all at once. It is speed metal that grins.

Laiho’s voice was a high, corrosive rasp, closer to black metal than the guttural death growl, and it cut through the neoclassical fireworks so the songs stayed songs. He could write a hook. Underneath the technicality, tracks like “Everytime I Die”, “Downfall” and “Hate Me!” have proper choruses, which is why the band broke well outside the shredder-nerd audience and became one of Finland’s biggest metal exports.

The band leaned into a sense of humour that a lot of extreme metal badly lacked. There were the covers — a deranged version of Britney Spears’s “Oops!… I Did It Again”, among others — the tongue-in-cheek song titles, the Grim Reaper mascot named Roy who adorned the album sleeves. It signalled that this was a band who took the playing deadly seriously and refused to take themselves seriously at all, and that combination is rare and disarming. You could be a virtuoso and still be a laugh. For a Finnish teenager in the early 2000s that was an intoxicating message, and it is a big part of why the country produced such a glut of technically gifted players in Bodom’s wake.

The guitar legacy

Strip away everything else and Alexi Laiho matters because of how he played. He was left-handed technique on a right-hander’s approach to melody, a player who could execute the most demanding neoclassical passages and still make them feel like part of a song rather than an exam. Guitar magazines ranked him among the best metal players of his generation for good reason: the fluency was total, the vibrato was expressive, and he had that rare thing, an instantly identifiable phrasing. You could name him from four bars.

He was also generous with it. The Laiho-Wirman guitar-versus-keyboard trade became a template that half of Europe’s melodic-metal bands borrowed, and a wall of young players learned to sweep because they wanted to play “Silent Night, Bodom Night”. He wore his influences openly — Iron Maiden’s twin leads, Malmsteen’s neoclassicism, the Gothenburg melodic-death sound — and fused them into something that a teenager could recognise and want to copy. That is the mark of a real stylist. His signature ESP guitars still sell.

The later years were rockier. The albums after Are You Dead Yet? (2005) drew a more divided response, and the band churned through a couple of guitarists before longtime member Roope Latvala departed and Daniel Freyberg came in. But even on the patchier records the playing never dropped. Laiho at half-power was still better than most guitarists at full stretch.

Part of what made the divided reception frustrating is that the peak was so high. Follow the Reaper and Hate Crew Deathroll (2003) are lean, vicious, endlessly replayable records, all momentum and melody, with barely a wasted second between them. When a band sets that bar early, everything afterward gets measured against it, and the middle-period albums — competent, heavier, less immediate — inevitably suffered by comparison. Heard fresh, without the weight of expectation, a lot of that later material holds up better than the forums ever gave it credit for. Bodom’s problem was never a lack of quality; it was following themselves.

The farewell nobody knew was final

In 2019 the founding trio — Raatikainen, bassist Henri Seppälä and Wirman — announced they would leave, which ended Children of Bodom as a functioning band. Laiho owned the name, so the group could not simply continue without them. The classic line-up played its last show on 15 December 2019 at the Black Box in Helsinki. It was billed as a farewell to that era; nobody in the room knew it was a farewell to everything.

Laiho did not stop. He and Freyberg formed Bodom After Midnight and had begun writing and recording when he died a year later, twelve months and two weeks after that final Helsinki show. The surviving members chose to disband the new project rather than carry on, which was the right call. Some bands are one person, and this one was.

The live band, in the good years, was a genuine spectacle of dexterity. Watching Laiho and Wirman trade solos on a festival stage was watching two players operate at the outer limit of what human hands can do at speed, and doing it while grinning at each other like they were getting away with something. Laiho fronted the whole enterprise with an easy, unbothered charisma — a slight, shaggy figure who did not need to prowl or posture because the notes did all the work. The band toured relentlessly through Europe and, especially, Japan, where the neoclassical-shred audience is deep and devoted, and where Bodom became something close to national heroes. Those shows are the thing a lot of us hold on to now: a couple of hours of pure, weightless technicality delivered without a shred of pomp.

Finland took it hard, because Finland claims its metal players as national figures in a way few countries do. The scene that gathers each summer at Tuska in Helsinki treated Laiho as one of its own, and the tributes that year came from across the country’s musical establishment. He sat in the same lineage as his melodic countrymen in Amorphis, though where Amorphis reach for myth and melancholy, Bodom reached for velocity and mischief. Between the two you get the emotional range of Finnish metal: the mist and the fireworks.

What he left

Children of Bodom sold well over a quarter of a million albums in Finland alone across their run and headlined festivals throughout Europe and Japan, where the neoclassical shred cult ran especially deep. That commercial footprint is real, but it undersells the influence. The band’s fingerprints are all over two decades of melodic and technical metal, on every keyboard-and-guitar duel and every player who decided that fast and tuneful could be the same thing.

The influence spread well beyond Finland. A generation of European melodic-death and power-metal bands borrowed the Bodom formula — the keyboard-guitar interplay, the neoclassical runs welded to singable choruses — and the “extreme power metal” tag that gets thrown around now owes much of its vocabulary to what Laiho worked out in the late nineties. Bands that never sounded remotely like Children of Bodom still absorbed the central lesson, which is that technical extremity and genuine songwriting can coexist without either one apologising. That is a bigger legacy than a quarter-million album sales, and it will outlast the sales figures by decades.

A year on, the sadness is the waste — a player at the height of his craft, gone at 41 from something that had been quietly taking him apart for years. The corrective to that sadness is the catalogue, which is enormous and joyful and technically absurd and full of choruses you can shout. Put on Follow the Reaper and it is 2000 again, and a kid from Espoo is racing a keyboard up a harmonic-minor scale and winning. That is the Laiho worth remembering — a guitar being played faster and more melodically than seemed possible, for the sheer grinning fun of it.

Rest easy, Wildchild.