Interview: Dead Undying (Finland) discuss their 'For Life For Death' industrialized metal debut
On the heels of several 2024 singles, the Helsinki band are back to deliver their anticipated and hotly wound full length 'For Life For Death.' An album that barrages you out the gate with the Soulfly meets Anaal Nathrakh-esque pitch perfect track "No One", pummeling with assurance of your insignificance, is not to be slept on! "Change" rumbles with Korn meets Pitchshifter meets death metal confidence!
No offense to bigger bands that dominate the metal sphere like Slipknot or Bring Me The Horizon or Megadeth ot whoever, but for me after writing about bands for literal decades, it is the most fun to discover cool up and coming acts that are hungry and thinking outside the box as they claw their way forward in the trenches of metal!! Dead Undying have a terrific balance of exciting extreme versus digestible, and the songs remember to be as excitement fueled yet catchy as the heyday of Psalm 69 or The Torture Technique.
Leena and Jouni from Dead Undying were able to correspond with me about their aesthetics and new material! Let's go.
1. Leena, Elina, Jouni...I heard your music and right away thought it had a cool and unique edge. Of course, the band configuration is also unique. How did Dead Undying come to be? How did you decide on this unique set-up as a keyboard backed, dual vocals band which still is somehow heavy?
Jouni: The whole thing started when we were all in a contemporary dance production that combined death metal elements and dance. And we kind of realized that we could form a band and got really excited about it. The setup came to be like this because, when we started, we wanted the band to be as flexible and easy to rehearse as possible.
So there are just three of us in the band. Leena and Elina are the vocalists and lyricists and I do the music and production. Also, I feel that there are more than enough traditional lineups, so I think there’s room for different types of bands as well. At the moment, we are looking for a live drummer, and we’ll see what the future brings. But we don’t feel any pressure to turn this into a traditional guitar-bass-drums live band even though I play guitars and bass guitars on the record. If it happens organically at some point, we’re not against it either.
2. How long did you exist as a band before starting working on your album? You have said 'For Life For Death' is about the sort of dual poles of existence and coming to terms with that. I relate to how we all must face this. It makes every moment really precious and not want to be detached. Also, cool to get to hear a band like yours in my lifetime! "The Great Meltdown" is intense and the intro almost reminds me of like Snot meets Arch Enemy! Do you discuss the themes a lot together?
Leena: So nice to hear that, thank you! We kind of started making the record immediately after forming the band in 2023. First we thought we would make an EP, but the songs just kept coming and quite soon we decided to just make a full-length album. As for the lyrics, we discussed together which themes we wanted to talk about in the beginning when we formed the band. After that the writing process has been free, honoring everyone's artistic freedom.
3. Did you always like a variety of music from death to Nu Metal to industrial? Is there a lot of snobs about this on Helsinki or more people are open minded? When I went to a folk festival in Estonia my cousin couldn't believe a vendor gave me a free beer just because we both liked Bathory! Hahaha. Metal unites!
Jouni: I have always liked music with a lot of energy, and when it comes to metal, these genres usually contain plenty of it. So it felt natural to combine death, industrial, and nu metal, and also throw in some darker elements. I think it works really well with the brutal death growls Leena and Elina deliver, and it also leaves plenty of room to explore different combinations. There aren’t many groups like us in Finland, so we’ll have to wait and see what the bigger audience thinks about us.
4. 12 songs make up the release. Was it hard to choose? That is a good number to give people a strong, full length album for awhile then eventually they will want more.
Jouni: To be honest, those 12 songs were all we had at that point. We could have skipped a song or two, but we felt all of them were strong tracks, so why not just put them all on the album. But yes, 40 minutes is a good length for this type of music, so it doesn’t start to repeat itself that much.
Leena: Since we deal a lot with death in our texts, and thus also with life, it seemed natural to include the themes in the name as well. The end result is the result of brainstorming together. We felt that the name has power in it but also a more poetic side as well.
6. What has been your favorite gigs you have played so far or part about performing live? Are people weirded out when they see no full live band and then you win them over? Your live performances look energized!
Leena: My favorite live show has to be the very first one, which was actually in a pretty big venue in the center of Helsinki. We were wondering what people would think about us, but we only got positive feedback. Of course, it helped that all of us have at least 15 years of experience performing live in the contemporary dance scene, since me and Elina are dancers and Jouni does music and sound design for the performances. So even though the situation was relatively new, the experience wasn’t. We truly had a great time and enjoyed every minute of it! And we like our performances to be energetic and physical. We always hope that our physicality gets others moving too.
7. Would you ever cover something industrial like Sister Machine Gun or Static-X? I can see you pulling off a great cover.
Jouni: We haven’t thought about making covers at the moment, but we do have Sepultura’s Roots Bloody Roots in our live set. In a way, it would be interesting to pick a song that’s a bit outside the box. Don’t know what it could be, maybe some Napalm Death. But right now, we’re focusing on our own music.
8. How does it feel to have your record almost out and what would you like to most tell new fans going through hard times?
Leena: We are very excited to share the album with metal music lovers! We hope that our music would bring energy to people and that they could enjoy its power, our brutal sounds and the mood of it. And, of course, we hope to see you all soon at our gigs!
#deathmetal #helsinkimetal #deadundying #numetal #extrememetal #heavymusic
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