A new band has engendered and I was looking forward to it, because you all have a proper past in several bands. How did this band Crownshift come into being (because I know that you have all been in Norther)?
Yes, we have a history with Norther, the band with Petri Lindroos as singer. It were the final stages of Norther, when me and Jukka (Koskinen – Nightwish & Wintersun – Vera) started to talk about that some day we would do something together, because the three of us clicked very well. We liked similar music and so on. That ‘some day’ has now finally arrived. It took a little while, but here we are and along the way Tommy (Tuovinen – MyGrain – Vera) was also one of my old buddies and I had several conversations with him that we probably were going to do something and we wanted to try him as vocalist and would he be up to that. He was always very interested and when the day finally came that we had something on tape, I just called him and asked: ‘now we have some songs, would you come here and try a couple of songs together and we’ll see from there’ and it went super well. We had totally the same page on everything.

Interesting indeed, in the past I reviewed MyGrain…
All right! MyGrain and my old band, we used to be at the same record label. That is how I got to know Tommy. I have a long way back with him as well.

That’s nice. Melodic death metal is of course a wide umbrella for a lot of things, but you also insert elements of other genres in your music. Can you tell something about that?
Influences are pretty much everything I hear. I don’t want to name certain bands or artists, but there is obviously a lot of outside the metal as well. It is a really wide list, a long list (chuckles).

If you like music I think it is only natural to check out other genres than metal…
Yeah and sometimes you can find surprising things that you would not find in metal from other genres. You can hear different sounds, like electronic music has quite a different pattern than sounds in metal and so you can absorb some influences from there as well.

Did you also play the keyboards on the album?
I did a little, but most parts are programmed. I am not a super well keyboard player, but I can play a bit. Basic things.

I guess you are the main composer. At what time did you start writing songs for this band?
I don’t have any certain point or year. It is a mix. I wrote these songs during many years. Some of them are older and some of them are recent, but it is always like a mix when I write. I write music all the time. Sometimes I go to my sessions to see ‘ah there is this cool riff’ and I never found any place for that riff until… sometimes it takes five years, sometimes ten years, sometimes straight away. I do a lot like separate riffs or melodies in my hard drive sessions. I don’t even know when I have written some parts. That is a very difficult question.

Do you have any rituals or a favourite cabin or studio when you write or can it happen everywhere?
It can happen everywhere. Obviously I have my home studio set up, but I also wrote music when I was touring with Children Of Bodom. On my phone where I stored a lot of good riffs and melodies. You don’t have to have like a high tech gear necessarily as long as you have some kind of recorder otherwise I tend to forget those.

When did the other guys come in sight composing wise or is it a matter of strictly you?
Usually I compose the basic song with guitars and programmed drums, sometimes bass also and then I send those tracks out to the other guys and I said to them: ‘if you have some ideas, just throw them’ and when we were rehearsing those parts, they came to my studio and we would record them and they came up with their ideas or their interpretation. So there is a lot of arrangement tweaking in the recording.

You also recorded the album and you were the producer…
Yes, this album I recorded also and produced it. It was quite an experience. We did not have any studio booked – except for the drums – everything else we did in my home studio and the mixing of course was outsourced. So there was freedom to be a little bit more creative in the recording process, because we did not have to worry about having not enough time or something like that.

How long did you eventually work on it, recording?
Ah that is another difficult question, we did this over many years. We did it whenever we felt like and when we had time. Obviously that took quite a while, because there wasn’t any deadline (chuckles), so it can also be a bad thing.

When did Nuclear Blast pop up as label? Of course COB was on Nuclear Blast, but when did you introduce the band let’s say?
I think it was 2021 or maybe 2022. Somewhere around that. It was funny, because the artist relation representive at Nuclear Blast used to work in Century Media and we worked with him with Norther. I think he was just prior by Nuclear Blast after COB break up. It was kind of a nice coincidence and surprise.

In the lyrics should be a story. What can you tell about that story?
There are several different stories. There is not any one theme or anything, but it is just a reflection of what we have experienced or sometimes they are like pure fiction as well. Most of the themes are like self-battle or transformation and stuff like that. It is just our way of writing those things. Usually I let the listener figure out the lyrics, because it can mean many things.

I have the impression that the album starts with two very heavy songs and then we have the list of singles and they are a bit more catchy…. Do you agree with that?
Yeah, the first one is quite a hurricane, a bit progressive, but it just felt like an opening track. We didn’t thought about ‘is this catchy enough’ or ‘is this short enough’, it just felt like ‘this is the opener and we are going to go with that’. The track list is always tricky. There are always some songs that do not necessary fit in place right away, but I think nevertheless that it is a good track list now. There are some not so aggressive songs in between like ‘My Prison’ and ‘Mirage’ which is like a break to take a breathe. And then there is the closing track ‘To The Other Side’ which is quite epic and adventurous as well, so there is quite a spectrum of different styles on one album.

What is that long occluding track about?
Well, that is about transformation lyrically and it was a huge challenge to write that. There is a lot of stuff inside those ten minutes. You can write so many different tracks despite how long they are and there is a lot happening.