Finnish Metal on vo.rs

Lordi: The Monsters Who Won Eurovision for Finland

Tue, 25 Feb 2025 09:00:00 +0000

On 20 May 2006, in an Athens arena built for pop ballads and key-changes, five people dressed as latex monsters played a hard-rock song called “Hard Rock Hallelujah” and won the Eurovision Song Contest with 292 points — the highest total in the contest’s history to that point. It remains Finland’s only Eurovision victory, and it is still, twenty years on, the single most improbable thing that competition has ever produced.

Amorphis: Finland's Kalevala Metal

Tue, 06 Feb 2024 09:00:00 +0000

Most bands pick a lyrical theme and abandon it inside two albums. Amorphis found theirs in 1994 in a book of nineteenth-century Finnish folk poetry and have been mining the same seam for three decades, which is a large part of why they still sound like nobody else. The Helsinki band took the Kalevala — the national epic Elias Lönnrot compiled from oral Karelian runes and published in its full form in 1849 — and made it the spine of a career that has run from raw death metal to sweeping, keyboard-lit folk metal without ever once feeling like a costume change.

Nightwish: Symphonic Metal at Full Scale

Sun, 08 Oct 2023 09:00:00 +0000

There is a moment at a big Nightwish show when the full orchestral backing swells, the choir comes in, the pyro goes up, and a Finnish metal band briefly sounds like the score to a film that does not exist. It is enormous, unapologetic, and slightly ridiculous, and that is exactly the point. Nightwish set out to make metal as grand as a symphony, and against considerable odds they actually managed it.

Children of Bodom: A Finnish Farewell

Wed, 29 Dec 2021 09:00:00 +0000

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.