On 8 February 1993 a quartet from Kuopio released one album and then stopped. That album, cut across six days at the end of December 1992 with Tuomo Valtonen at the desk, is still the record the rest of the world reaches for when it wants to explain what happened on the eastern side of the Gulf of Bothnia. There has never been a second one.
The country next door had a studio, a distortion pedal and a national style that could be copied in an afternoon, which is the subject of two sounds from one country. Finland had none of those things. What it had instead was two dozen small towns, no central room, no shared chain of equipment and no interest whatsoever in agreeing on a tone, and the result is the least uniform national scene the genre produced in its first decade.
One album, and then nothing
Demilich were Antti Boman on vocals and guitar, Aki Hytonen on guitar, Ville Koistinen on bass and Mikko Virnes on drums, and Nespithe is built out of riffs that refuse to resolve where the ear expects them to, harmonies that slide sideways instead of stepping, and a voice produced so far down that Pitchfork, giving the record eight out of ten many years later, reached for a phrase about words belched out as poisonous clouds. Necropolis issued it in 1993. Repulse reissued it in Europe in 1996, Century Media in 2003 with the demos attached, Xtreem remastered it in 2009, and Svart put out the twentieth anniversary edition that is now treated as the reference pressing. Four reissues for one album by a band that had already dissolved is not a normal commercial history.
Turku, Loimaa, Nokia and the towns nobody outside the country can place
The map is the argument. In Turku, the old capital on the south west coast, Xysma played a crossover of death metal and grindcore with more humour in it than the form usually tolerates, alongside Disgrace and the murkier Funebre. Fifty kilometres inland at Loimaa, Demigod and Adramelech built something occult and slower, and Demigod's Slumber of Sullen Eyes, released in 1992, drew a line from Terrorizer that has followed the band ever since: Florida groove meeting the Swedish buzzsaw. In Nokia, outside Tampere, Convulse formed in 1988 under the name S.D.S. around Rami Jamsa, Juha Telenius, Janne Miikkulainen and Jani Kuhanen, and put World Without God out in 1991 through the French label Thrash Records. Purtenance and Rippikoulu came from the same anti-authoritarian corner of the country, and Rippikoulu sang in Finnish, which almost nobody else did.
Helsinki produced the band that mattered most by not lasting. Abhorrence formed in early 1989 around the guitarists Tomi Koivusaari and Kalle Mattsson with Jukka Kolehmainen singing, Jussi Ahlroth on bass and Kimmo Heikkinen on drums, played dozens of shows with the Turku bands, put out the demo Vulgar Necrolatry and a seven inch on Seraphic Decay, lost the master tapes and every penny that should have followed them because there was no contract, and dissolved in 1990. The band lasted about eighteen months. What came out of it lasted thirty five years.
No central studio, no shared pedal, no agreed tone. Finland is the one first wave scene that never standardised itself, and that is the reason its records still sound like separate objects.
What the Finnish records do that the Swedish ones do not
The distinction is structural rather than tonal, which is why it survives the fact that the two countries used some of the same equipment and occasionally the same producer. Stockholm built forward motion: a wall of guitar, a riff that drives, a mix in which the low end is a texture. The Finnish records put the weight underneath and let it pull. Bass carries what the guitars carry in Sweden, tempos sag into doom passages without announcing it, the melodies come in at odd intervals and go out unresolved, and the rhythms are syncopated in ways that make a first listen feel like a mistake in the pressing. Writers who cover the scene keep arriving at the same three words for it, which are low, strange and putrid, and when a Finnish band did sound Swedish, as Mordicus did, the compliment was framed as an accusation.
I am driven by my longing, and my understanding urges that I should commence my singing.
The Kalevala, translated by W. F. Kirby, 1907
Amorphis took the folklore and left the genre
Koivusaari's second band is the one that got out. Amorphis formed in Helsinki in 1990 with Jan Rechberger and Esa Holopainen, Olli-Pekka Laine on bass and Koivusaari singing, recorded the demo Disment of Soul in 1991, and released The Karelian Isthmus through Relapse in 1992. Then came the record that broke the scene open and simultaneously walked away from it. Tales from the Thousand Lakes was tracked in September 1993, produced by Tomas Skogsberg with the band, released by Relapse on 12 July 1994 with Kasper Martenson on keyboards and Ville Tuomi guesting on clean vocals, and built its lyrics out of the Kalevala, the national epic assembled from oral poetry in the nineteenth century. It sold more than a hundred thousand copies and became the biggest selling record Relapse had. The engineer who made the buzzsaw was in the room and the record has no buzzsaw on it at all, which settles the question of whether the Swedish sound was ever really about the equipment.
Sentenced took the other exit. Formed in Muhos in 1989 as Deformity, they made Shadows of the Past in 1991 as fast European death metal, signed to Century Media in 1994, slowed and sweetened the writing on Amok in 1995, replaced Taneli Jarva with Ville Laihiala in 1996 and spent the following decade as a gothic metal band with number one albums at home. The founding guitarist Miika Tenkula died in 2009 of a heart attack caused by a genetic condition. The band had played its last show in Oulu on 1 October 2005.
The second Finland
The scene was effectively over by 1995 and came back from about 2005 with the atmosphere turned up and the tempo turned down. Hooded Menace put Fulfill the Curse out through Profound Lore in 2009, Lie in Ruins released Swallowed by the Void the same year, and Krypts and Corpsessed followed with records built on cavernous production, slow decaying riffs and an aesthetic that pointedly refuses technical display. Abhorrence reformed in 2013, twenty two years after they had given up, played the Tuska festival and issued new material through Svart, and in 2020 Markus Makkonen and Kim Stromsholm published a three hundred page history of the whole scene through the same label, the first serious attempt anybody had made to write it down.
The verdict is straightforward and it has taken thirty years to become uncontroversial. Finland produced fewer records than Sweden, sold a fraction as many, and exported almost nothing at the time, and the records that survived the drought are more distinct from one another than any comparable national set. The country to the west had a house style. The country to the north had almost nothing until the churches began to burn, and that part of the story is norwegian Death Metal, Before the Churches Burned.
