Asked straight out whether Children of Bodom might record new music with him singing, Samy Elbanna did not say no. He said it was the wrong question.
"I don't think that's the conversation, you know," the Lost Society frontman told Chaoszine. "It's because we're celebrating music. That's what it is. And, you know, Alexi, his music is so timeless."
His argument is that the songs hold up because they were never chasing anything. "When you hear those melodies, you hear those songs, they're not following a particular trend. They weren't made influenced by a particular thing. They're something that, no matter what's happening in rock or metal, they always sound relevant. And I feel like there's so much music that works so well live, and I think that's the whole idea."
He points at the Finnish Broadcasting Company's orchestral metal programme as proof: the melodies survived being handed to a symphony orchestra, which is not true of most things written with a distortion pedal. Nothing in the interview rules out new music. It simply makes clear that nobody involved is working on any.