Let us give it a start with the writing process of ‘Netherworlds’. Some of the songs were mainly written by you, for instance ‘Arch Of The Sky’. How do you look back on that process of writing in general?
We started writing quite early in 2025 I think. We had some small parts of songs and drafts on the last sessions. We started writing and I think in the Summer and Autumn of 2025, although the Summer was quite busy with my job. I think things got easier in the Autumn 2025 when I was able to work more on my own music and I also co-wrote some music with Niilo (vocalist, bass – Vera). It is always a kind of long process. It takes a long time and then you always get more and more into music until you enter the studio. That is the way of the musical process, continue and remaining productive until you have a deadline for the studio. Then you just have to record stuff and make decisions how the final arrangements are. Real writing took about a year, more than a year, first rather slowly and then accelerating pace and then one day we have plenty material at the studio.

We should not forget to mention that you also made an EP (‘Songs of the Dusk’) in 2023, right after full length ‘Anno 1696’, but that was with calmer songs. Is that the reason why I have the impression that ‘Netherworlds’ is more up tempo?
It is hard to say. We did not have a special idea what kind of music we were writing. We were thinking about lyrically we should have some theme or big story, but we did not come up with some conceptual idea. We decided, let us just write music and we will see where the process takes us. I think Tomy made one last song and it was kind of a mix of different tempos. We reduced it a bit and then for the first time we used tempo maps for the songs, so it is a small tempo change in each song this time. Some parts may be a little bit faster and the other had some small tweaks, forgotten mimics in the songs we never used before. Some parts might be a few mimics faster than the others. In general we just write music and see where it leads to and then until we have a collection of songs that make a nice album.

It is the first album with a new guitarist Tomy Laisto. Why was it necessary to have three guitarists now?
(chuckles) Well, we needed somebody to do live shows full time, because I am too busy with my daily work at the university. I cannot be touring so much, so we needed somebody being able to do the touring. Tomy was filling in already I think in 2024 and also in 2025, but we needed somebody who can work live and stay. We came up with Tomy back in the day and we tried him out and now he is a full member of the band.

He really grew into it, first as a live member and now he even composes with you…
Yes, this is the first album that we have him. One song called ‘The Banished’ is fully made by Tomy, with Tomy’s ideas and I arrange and maybe kind of Insomniumized the song a bit, but it is literally Tomy’s song and he had also other ideas as well. When it was time to put all the demos into final versions, there was plenty of Tomy’s material that is still left and we can probably work on it in the future and turn those ideas into Insomnium songs.

Another thing that struck me is that there are more clean vocals…
Yes that might be more. All the guitar players are singing, different person’s voices. Sometimes upfront, depending on the song, it brings more diversity I think. There are more clean vocals this time around, maybe but it was not intentional. Maybe because everybody is getting more used to singing, It comes more like a natural part of expressing. Still Niilo’s vocals are always the dominant thing. When clean vocals would be fitting, we are not afraid of it anymore. Every song has a lot of elements and we follow our emotions to express our ideas. It is good to change things a bit, avoiding sounding predictable.

A track that leaps to the eye is ‘The Hour Grows Late’, with three musicians from Amorphis as guests… How did that idea turned into reality?
This idea came from our sound engineer/producer Miiro Varjus. He has been working with both bands, with Amorphis and then Insomnium and he knows both bands very well. He asked Tomi Joutsen to do some clean vocals in the song and Tomi said yes. I was also thinking that maybe we could also use some growling vocals from Tomi Koivusaari, the Amorphis guitar player and originally Markus (Vanhala – guitarist Insomnium – Vera) had composed these sorts of keyboard lead for this song. The original version was good, but then we thought about Santeri Kallio, the keyboardist from Amorphis and maybe he could give it a bit of twist on that existing keyboard line and then everybody said ‘yes it is very nice’ and so we wanted to have it featuring on the album and I think they really contributed a lot  to the song, even small features and I really think it fits the song perfectly. So we are really happy to have them featuring on the album in this song.