Finntroll: Where Giants March

As the saying goes, smash a mirror and get seven years bad luck, who knows if blackened folk metal band FINNTROLL have been around any mirrors on their world tours but after seven long years away the band are back with the sublime new album Vredesvävd, an album short in length (it’s the shortest of their career) but one of the best in terms of variety and scope, it’ll take you multiply listens to get the full breadth of its depth. Distorted Sound sat down with lead singer Vreth (or Mathias Lillmåns to his mum) to talk about the new album and what exactly been happening in that seven year gap.

Musicians and especially rock stars are sometimes seen as super heroes or gods, untouchable up there on the stage, six foot above us all surveying the battleground of the pit below, their lives must be perfect, right? Wrong, if anything COVID has made us all realise is that we all are in fact human. What affects the bank clerk or sandwich maker also affects musicians, we are all the same. Vreth tells us how the band have been in 2020 and how world affairs have affected them.

“We have been keeping busy surrounding the release. We don’t have to deal with the outside world so much. I’m here in my smaller town doing interviews, planning stuff. We can go on, even though we are supposed to be on tour, that’s kind of sad. We were actually in the studio when lockdown happened and we used it to our advantage and bunkered down and got on with it.”

A band this far into their careers, this being their seventh album into a 23 year career may feel invincible or undaunted by another upcoming album cycle but in the world of 2020 this has all been changed. “I get very nervous when releasing new albums especially with the gap. We were really stressed out because we wanted to make something worthy of the FINNTROLL name, it made us super critical and it we threw so much material out.”

A seven year gap in any person’s career can be detrimental especially in the fast paced world of social media. Yesterday’s next big thing can be today’s garbage. After seven years away we dive into what the band have been doing in the mean time. “I could sense it coming between 2007 and 2015 we were super busy, European tours, US tours. It was a lot to do. We needed a break as a band and it felt like it was going to take at least four years. Whenever we make a FINNTROLL album, we need that red thread or theme on the album and that took a long time to find and be comfortable with. There was so many sounds and themes that we had to work through. Two years ago was probably when we were at out darkest point and looking for an answer.”

Vreth talks about when they found that spark for creativity. “We came off tour in 2015 and we started writing around then for the next cycle but the material was all over the place and it would never have been put onto an album at that point. The initial spark really happened last year, we were on tour at a festival in Europe. We were doing an interview and they asked when are we going to do a comeback and I thought ‘hang on have we been forgotten about?!’ I discussed it with the band and we put a deadline on it for 2020 and really got started on the process of putting something together.”

Combining music with the visual medium can sometimes be hard for an artist to interpret and other times can be easily combined especially when band members have an extra set of skills hidden away. We chat to Vreth about the magic eye quality of the album cover. “The music was a little bit darker this time so that plays into the colour and it all comes from the mind of the artists within the band. There is another aspect to come into play which is the lyrics and that gets interpreted.”

Continuing on the theme of matching the aural with the visual we chat about the recently released videos of Mask and Forsen. “It was back and forth on the animated one because wanted to release more. We needed to release three singles but we didn’t want to just release anything off the album that we couldn’t translate visually. Because of lockdown we had to wait for people moving around, like one of us was in Germany and if he come into Finland there is 14 day quarantine to think of. The animated one we used people we had used before and that was more of a direct interpretation.”

2020 feels like a write off for everyone and we look forward to 2021. “The album release date was due to be in August but due to staff cuts at the production plant and we should have been deep into 32 shows in Europe. March and April we are going to be on tour in 2021. We did have an album release gig last week but the rules are all over the place, the Finnish government are not helping right now!”

Vredesvävd is out now via Century Media Records.

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