Some bands make you wait for it. It’s understandable if you have any idea what all goes into writing, recording, and releasing an album. The writing process alone for many bands can stretch years before they even get into the studio and that’s not to take into account anything to do with labels and the Hell that is the business side of things. When you get down to it, making music is hard and a lot of bands need time to recharge, refuel, and rethink their next move. Other bands, like Finland’s Wolfheart, are too brimming with ideas for releases to take it nice and slow.
Since forming in 2013, Wolfheart has released six records, with the seventh, Draconian Darkness, set to hit shelves September 6. For most bands, seven albums in just over a decade would be a Herculean feat. Wolfheart and vocalist/guitarist Tuomas Saukkonen, on the other hand, typically can’t wait to get the approval to start working on the next album. When talking with Saukkonen, it’s easy to see why. More than a decade with the band has done nothing to dampen his enthusiasm for creating Wolfheart music. I recently caught up with Saukkonen over Zoom to chat about the new record and what’s keeping the fire raging in the Wolfheart camp.
When did you start the writing process for Draconian Darkness and how did that go?
Tuomas: I started writing, roughly, last September. We did the standalone single, Iku-Turso, in August and then finally I got the greenlight from the management that I can start working on the new album and that they’ll make it possible that the album will come out about now. We did two tours, one in Finland and one in Europe, so I was writing between the tours, which is ideal for me. It works really well that I step out from the writing mode and go out there [on stage]. If I spend too much time on the writing role, it’s too much of that environment for me. It was all written before December and we started recording the album at that time. It was a very fast and painless process.
When you started writing, did you want to continue what you guys had done on King of the North or branch out into different directions?
Tuomas: Darker. That was the main thing. I wanted to write a darker album, not necessarily all heavier, but the heavier parts had to be heavier. Also, with the orchestration, I wanted to be more cinematic than symphonic, if that makes any sense. How I explained it to our producer is, if you’ve seen the movie Dune, if you put a metal band underneath the soundtrack, that would create the best music in the universe. That kind of stuff. You have a movie soundtrack that is played by a band instead of a band taking symphonic elements and sounding like Nightwish. Nothing against Nightwish, I love the band and the guys, but [the goal was] to make it more cinematic, like when you take the vocals out, it sounds like a movie soundtrack.
What made you want to go darker here?
Tuomas: I still wouldn’t change anything on the King of the North but it was our most mid-tempo and easiest album, in some ways. I needed to challenge myself. A lot of songs from the King of the North were easy to play live, which sometimes is nice, but also some of the songs became a bit boring, not for the audience and not for us as entertainers, but there was very little happening with the guitar. Mainly, I’m first a guitar player and then I’m a songwriter. I wanted to have an album that challenges myself a little bit more, is a lot more riff orientated and, when it came to the songwriting itself, I wanted to make the contrast bigger. The previous album was a little bit, looking back, safe. It was very basic Wolfheart. On this album, I wanted and I needed to push the boundaries a little bit more.
Did pushing those boundaries help to keep things fresher for you on this album?
Tuomas: It did. It also, and not that I’m planning to write the next album anytime soon, but the latest album shows the way the band is going and I’m really excited for this direction we have now and I know I’m going to love writing the next album, even though I shouldn’t think about that because [this] album isn’t out. With the last album, I was a little bit uncertain. I didn’t feel like I could carry on in that direction because it would be too soft. On this album, I know that when I have the approval from the label and management to start working on the new album, I’m going to be super excited. This opens more doors than it closes when you are expanding the variety of the songwriting.
Were the other guys on board with the direction or did it take any convincing at all?
Tuomas: They were. I think everybody in the band fully agrees that having more cinematic and more raw and darker elements on the music [works], especially our drummer [Joonas Kauppinen]. He’s basically my main guy. He runs the company behind the band, does all the financial and tax company stuff, and blah blah blah. He does that stuff; I do the creative stuff. We both need to exist for things to go on. When I started writing the music, I have a very selfish approach. I first write for myself what I want to hear and play. While the songs started to get more ready, I knew the songs were gonna make my drummer the happiest guy in the world. The more blast beats, the better he’s doing. It also gives more room for our guitar player [Vagelis Karzis] and bass player [Lauri Silvonen] to do stuff with their vocals. They have a lot bigger role as vocalists as well so I’m able to put them in the spotlight also. I think that is also better for the fans, to not just expand musically but to also bring new sides from the musicians in the band.
What is your writing process like?
Tuomas: I always start with some initial idea, a riff or melody. Rarely is it a drum pattern. Even more rarely, it’s a piano. Either way, it’s one idea that’s part of the riff or melody. If that’s good enough, then I start building the song around that. If it’s a verse, I’ll start building the bridge and go to the chorus and then think about what the song needs next. What’s the best structure and arrangement for this energy for the song to go forward? I never have a compilation of riffs where I go back in later and start choosing what I should do or not. I only have, like, one idea that I build into a song and then that is the song. Then I book a studio, do the basic demo with the basic drum and guitar and bass arrangements and then that’s the version I send to the other guys. We don’t have the ability to rehearse much. If we go crazy, we do two rehearsals before the tour but usually it’s one, so we don’t get to jam or play together and try out the new material. I send the [demos] and then we start working together and I start getting feedback. We change something if it needs changed. I never interfere when the bassist does the bassline or the drummer adds his stuff on top or the solos. That’s their territory.
What’s your process like for lyrics then?
Tuomas: I write lyrics in a very late state of the production. I’ve tried, many times, just to have something or some core structure of lyrics that I could continue later on, but everything is nonsense to me until the song is ready. I always write the majority of the lyrics in the studio when I start hearing the songs pretty much ready in the mixing stage. We do the vocals as the last thing because of that. I need to hear the song. I need to pretty much hear the final song in some level of mix to get the vibe and the mood of the song. That’s not the ideal but it’s art. That’s my excuse. There’s no rules in art so why should there be rules in this [laughs]. It works for us and it does make the lyric writing really inspirational to me because I get into it when the time is right.
What kind of topics do you explore with your lyrics on the new record?
Tuomas: To do a comparison to the previous album, King of the North was about Finnish mythology, about the time where men were respecting nature and living in harmony with nature. We had beliefs that the bears are gods and that rain comes from the sky because of gods and we prayed for better weather and stuff like that. We took only what we needed but the modern man doesn’t do that. We kill and burn. That’s basically what the new album is about. It’s not about today, tomorrow, or yesterday; it’s about the current state of the world, what’s been going on for the past 300 years and going to continue on, hopefully, another 300 years. I don’t know, it doesn’t look very good at the moment. It’s basically about the pattern of human beings. We wage wars, we steal the land, we steal the valuables from the land, and we don’t care, to summarize things very bluntly. That’s either gonna wear out where there’s not going to be people or the earth. That’s the topic of this album. Every song is a different approach. Some of them are historical; some are about human behavior. Some of the songs are about what’s going to await us in the future if we continue to go like this.
How did the recording process for Draconian Darkness go?
Tuomas: This was a very basic Wolfheart album. We used the same studio that we used for the previous three albums, outside of King of the North, and the same guy [Saku Moilanen] did the mixing and mastering so nothing changed on that team. We basically work individually. I did visit on both the drum recordings and the bass recordings but just for the fun of the hangout, not to supervise or check on them. Everybody focuses on their own stuff with the producer and sound engineer. Vagelis lives in Greece so he recorded most of his solos there. It was like we usually do stuff.
I wanted to ask about a few of the tracks on the record and how you came up with them specifically. What led to “Evenfall?”
Tuomas: There’s two songs on the album that I thought, when I was doing the demos, that this probably isn’t going to go well with Wolfhert so I thought I’d use them on some other project or band. I did want to play them for the guys and both this and “Trial By Fire,” the guys voted, should be on the album so who am I to say? I understand and realize I have a very unhealthy connection with the song. As a songwriter, I hear things differently. I shouldn’t make all the decisions on the music because of that. I don’t have a clear perspective on the music until one year after the album is out. Being the sole songwriter doesn’t mean that the band doesn’t have an equal vote. If three out of four say this is going to be a song on the album, then I’m wrong and they are right. They are equally the band as I am. Now that the single is out, I listen to it and am super happy that it’s on the album. They heard something on the song that I didn’t.
How about the inspiration behind “Grave?”
Tuomas: That’s my favorite. That’s one of the songs that I told everybody that I don’t care, this is my veto, I’m going to pick this as my veto. Again, an unhealthy connection with the songs. This was something that I wasn’t going to give away, no matter who tells me what. I’d already decided that when I was doing the demo. This was the first single, period. I really wanted to make the song as evil and raw as I could and still fit the concept of our music. I really wanted to make the beginning of that song as heavy and raw as possible while still feeling like our music. It makes the chorus sound even bigger and more majestic and symphonic because the beginning of the song is beating the listener in the face with a hammer until the chorus begins.
You guys have released a few videos already for the singles. What was the process like for making those and how involved were you guys?
Tuomas: Insanely involved, as involved as I physically can be. The company behind the band is also a video production company and we’ve done all of our videos ourselves. We have this one camera guy that we use for all the videos; he’s basically the sixth member of the band. He has such a big role in the visual side and I don’t think I’d want to make videos without him. I do the production, I do the editing, and our camera guy does the shooting. Everything is, basically, handled internally. It’s probably me being a bit of a nerd but I love that when the album is done, then I get to dig into the whole visual side. I get to start thinking about a lot of fun and stupid stuff that I get to do with the videos, like, are we going to burn something? Are we gonna make something explode? Is something going to freeze? Are we going to freeze? Which part of the country are we going to go to? We shot “The Grave” in Iceland in three days and we did a couple other videos there too.
This is your first LP with Reigning Phoenix Music. How did you end up with them and what’s that relationship been like?
Tuomas: It’s been amazing. [It’s great] having a label that also understands the visual side and sees our strength that we are able to cost-efficiently produce very good looking music videos. We started to have the talk before they even launched the label. Our management has good connections and knew this was going to happen, that this would be a new label. Naturally, we were super excited to see what was going to happen because this kind of thing hasn’t happened in 20 years at least. There haven’t been any new, big labels in the industry. It’s only been small indie labels dying. It looked like there was only gonna be Nuclear Blast, Metal Blade, Century Media, [and] Napalm. Those are gonna be the only ones ruling the whole business. Atomic Fire was kind of like a big wave with a lot of bands from Nuclear Blast coming to that label.
This is on a different scale. This is a label that comes, announces itself, and starts the whole thing with bands like Meshuggah, Opeth, Amorphis, Kerry King, Helloween, and so many more. This is a very big event in the music business. Knowing that this kind of thing was in motion was very exciting and our deal ended with Napalm so we were like a free agent anyway. There were other offers, also Napalm was interested in continuing. We did negotiate and talk with the Reigning Phoenix guys for a long time, nothing happened in weeks, it was more like months. In the end, there was no question about the winner. So far, it looks like it was the best decision that we’ve done.
Continuing on that visual theme, you’ve worked with VisionBlack for the last chunk of album covers. How did you hook up with him and how much input do you give for the covers?
Tuomas: I think it was 2014 or 2015 when we played a festival in Crete, which is one of the islands in Greece. I paid attention to the poster and the flyers and all the graphics and Facebook banners and stuff like that. I asked the organizer who did the artwork [since] I could use this guy. I like the way he does things and how they look. It was actually the guy that organized the festival so we agreed that maybe we should do something together, maybe some T-shirts for us for the merch or posters. He did some posters for our tours, and then I learned that he does album covers also so we started working together. He’s done four Wolfheart covers and six other covers for me so he’s basically the only guy I use nowadays. I try to give him as little guidance as possible. At least I want the first idea to be his. I send him songs, as many as I have ready at that point, so he can get the mood of the album. I tell certain things that are visually important for the album and then he gives his idea and vision of that. He’s a super professional and easy guy to work with as well.
The last song I wanted to ask about was the closer, “The Gale.” How did you come up with that one?
Tuomas: I have this habit, at least with Wolfheart, to write the final song. I need to have a specific song that ends the album and a lot of albums have this where if you take that song out of the context of the album, it doesn’t even sound like a Wolfheart song. When you hear it as part of the album, it kind of closes the circle perfectly. I really wanted to have a song that was designed to end the album. With our bass player developing himself as a vocalist…every time he gets into the studio for every album he’s double better than he used to be. As a good example, he’s now able to lead these acoustic parts that are the most brutal for any clean vocalist. You have nothing to hide behind. There’s no wall of guitars, no big drums, or bass, or orchestrals. It’s just you and the guitar and the way he does that, I think, sets the whole mood for the song that, in a way, it doesn’t matter what happens after that. It was designed to be the final song.
Photo at top: Draconian Darkness album cover
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