Biography
One night in march 1997 two men were sleeping in a rehearsal room in Helsinki. The other woke up and started playing the keyboards and came up with a folkish melody. Soon the other one woke up too. Liking the melody he asked the other guy to play the riff in traditional finnish "humppa" style (humppa is a variety of polka...). This sounded very mean and guitars and brutal vocals were added immediatly.These two drunken fellows were Somnium and Katla. Thus FINNTROLL was born...
Almost a year later in January FINNTROLL recorded their debut demo "rivfader" .Soon several musicians stepped into the picture. Drummer B. Dominator (BARATHRUM, RAPTURE), Skrymer on guitars, Trollhorn (MOONSORROW) on keyboards and Tundra on bass. Spikefarm had shown interest in the band and now that FINNTROLL was a band with several strong musicians the deal was sealed.
The debut album "Midnattens Widunder" contains nine tracks of advanced trollish metal. At last the FINNTROLL has woken from its long sleep to strike down the followers of the christian plague...
About a year after that, it was the time to take the next step in this trollish crusade and Walltone Studios were once again inhabited by FINNTROLL. This time the guys knew better what they wanted to do and the session went smoothly and without any problems they encountered on the first trip. The result was an album called "Jaktens Tid". With this album FINNTROLL took a huge step forward both musically and in overall athmosphere. At last they could say that this was how they wanted to sound like. The album got great reviews all over the world and was praised by countless of people. FINNTROLL was stronger that ever before. The album managed to climb to 20th place in the Finnish album charts, surprising both band and the label. Soon after that Century Media was attracted by this success and licensed the album for the rest of the world.
On that summer FINNTROLL played in several open-airs both in Finland and abroad. The best performance was probably seen in Wacken Open Air, where they were actually asked by the organizers to play another show next day! Unfortunately Trollhorn had returned back to Finland and they were unable to do it. In the autumn they were supposed to start their first European tour, but were forced to cancel it due the severe loss of Katla's voice. Band was struggling on despite the unfortunate loss of Katla's voice. He went through several surgical operations in hope of restoring his voice. At first it seemed that Katla would get his voice back if given enough time to rest. Band was hoping for all the best and waited for Katla's voice to get better. But even when he had gone through many operations, and tried other numerous methods for curing his voice, it didn't helped. He felt better to step down from a vocalist's position and let the band move on. The third Album was called " Visor om Slutet ". Vocal's were taken over by band's friend Tapio Wilska. Katla was also making his appearances on this experimental acoustic album, as for an farewell for all the friends and fans.
After the release of the " Visor om Slutet " on 24th April 2003, band was facing another even more tragid accident. Our dear friend Teemu " Somnium " Raimoranta died on 16th March 2003 at the exceptionally young age of just 25. He suffered fatal injuries from a fall off Helsinki's Pitkäsilta bridge onto ice below. This was a really hard blow for everybody in a band and for close friends of the band.
decided, as for honouring Teemu's memory and his parent's wishes, to continue the saga. At this point band was ready to quit as it seemed that bad karma was just too strong over the band. But FINNTROLLFINNTROLL hit on their very first European tour as an support act with KATATONIA. Teemu's place was taken over by an long time friend of the band, Mikael Karlbom, who had also act as an step-in guitarist for FINNTROLL before.
Next fall after the tour, band locked themselves into Walltone studios to record band's forth Album "Nattfödd ". It was released sometime in spring´04 with the EP "Trollhammaren". Shortly after the release of the album the band got their first headline tour. Supporting acts were ENSIFERUM and The Wake. FINNTROLL also unleashed their very first music video, suprisingly... "Trollhammaren" which was played across the europe and got really good feedback all over. After that band has concentrated more on doing shows across the europe, and are waiting the possibility to punish the other continents as well.
There is not yet any dates when FINNTROLL will hit the studio to record the next full-lenght, but probably sometime during the 2005-2105.
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