Hell'o and thank you! We wish also only the best for our best album so far!

We've been around already about 15 years, so it's a lifetime for a metal band, half of a lifetime for me, and there's also a lot of time for happenings during so long period. Our history is full of people having not enough time for the band 'cause of work or family, moving far away to another city, those famous musical differences etc. Stranger things have happened. So only the best survive for the grand finale, this is like evolution ya know! Also as i'm a big fan of Jeff Waters of Annihilator, Chuck Schuldiner of Death and Richie Blackmore, i guess this kind of a windy line-up issue comes there as an influence. Not!

We've had our fair share of bad luck in the business field, starting from the bankrupting labels to about anything you can imagine. There's no business like show business or cd business at the moment! It's really tough here with the labels as cd's won't sell much but everything else in the business costs a fortune. Sometimes (usually in our case) i don't understand labels, as it happens too often that the label pays big money to record the album but then "forgets" to promote the album in a proper way. In a huge jungle of music releases even the best albums disappear without much promoting of course. You can sell loads of shit with huge campaigns, but you can't sell gems without telling to anybody that you're doing it, at least usually… The case with Nuclear Blast was that we were there a wrong band in the wrong time in the wrong place i guess. We did our strange experiment and most un-commercial album back then and "Once" by Nightwish we're released about the same time, and it even sold better than our album… So the other one should go. But so far everything going nice an' easy with the Lifeforcesters, lots of good happening and it seems that even the media is loving us loudly! We appreciate!

Because we've like found the truest form and soul of Omnium Gatherum here on this album, so clichéd and cheesy than it'll sound. Means, this is like the big vision come to flesh (or album format??) that we had during the nineties teenage years when we wanted to form a death metal band playing a melodic and lil bit progressive way. The perfect marriage of teenager melodic death metal and adult progressive rock thru a Finnish melancholy! The album is full of unprejudiced music, not to be limited in stuck to some boring generic boundaries. That's like thinking outside "the box". There's lots of different moods and emotions gathered and the songs are sailing from the darkest Finnish melancholy to full of hope, from brutal deathmetal storming to proggy mellow pathways. Adult oriented death metal, like we say it. Expect nothing but the best music you will ever heard.

It's kind of a good teaser and "quickcheck" of the whole album, you know, as it's epic journey into the different moods from brutality to beat so it gives a really good picture about the style and range of the album ! The gig shooting was done at our real live gig in Helsinki, so it's not any posing kind of thing. A real deal live with real sweat! Then some parts on Jukka singing was done, somewhere in Finland I guess, I don't even know… I don't also know where is the location where that bird flies on the video, haha. But there's lil bit snow also, so it's gotta be the Finnish land. Jussi Rautaniemi did the video, and he is also one of our "trusted man gang" and this was already 4th time we worked with Jussi… Cool guy, even won some Cannes movie fest stuff so he is on a mission!

There's one big idol feature now dealt with on "New World Shadows", as Dan Swanö is also singing on the album beside also mixing and mastering. I've been a fan of his work since the early '90's and the Edge Of Sanity stuff! Randy Rhoads (R.I.P.), Edward Van Halen, Jeff Waters, Adrian Smith & Steve Morse guitar duel with my masters would be coooool!

Yeah, i could say the new album really presents us in a true form that we're after and it points rightly where we stand as a band. The band action, in our point of view, is about to beat those standards with your every new release or otherwise you can call it a day and do something else… This is about mental masturbation and pleasing yourself with a work of art.

Anything goes. State of mind, good music, good films, nature, atmosphere, songtitles from Jukka, overall good spirit among the band, even paintings & pictures, you name it… You always have that gut feeling that there's some another thing coming, and then ya cast it on tape. But, yeah, we try to be to be versatile on our stuff and make interesting music with many shapes and sides. Going from one emotion to another in a blink of an eye and try to do it smoothly and catchy way. Like cheat the listener.

I guess he just got bored with this difficult and strange lifestyle of playing in a active metal band, it's of course difficult to fit all the touring, studio and rehearsing schedules to your "normal life". He just wanted to do something different for a while, like play basketball (laughs) But he's a mystery man, basic Finnish dude, doesn't speak too much about own things… The thing that Harri left had a positive impact on that side, that the continuity on this album is much more complete now and the big picture, the redline, stays better since the beginning to the ending. As the album is now composed by one person, that's me. Of course outside that it was sad to see Harri resigning from the OG family after over 10 years together bu he just wanted to do something else with his life for awhile, like play basketball…And that's in fact true with this case!

At first there's confirmed a Finnish tour to start the live actions of the new album and from Finland we continue to the first European tour leg as a direct support for ROTTING CHRIST in April/May. Our agency is working on more tours and checking options so more touring is coming definitely, and for German metal festival heaven we've confirmed so far With Full Force open air and we're waiting that event eagerly to please the german metal warriors and mistresses with their raising vikinghorns! (laughs) Hopefully some more serious touring action will be confirmed soon because that's what really matters nowadays in this big jungle of music overflow. We did 100 shows in support of our previous album "The redshift", and toured with great bands like DARK TRANQUILLITY, NILE, SWALLOW THE SUN, GRAVE, INSOMNIUM, so hopefully we can at least do that same amount again, even better would be to double that, 'cause live is what we love mostly on this and OG is surely delivering the goods on live situation!

Thank ya all if ya had guts to read my interview this far, haha! Let the "New World Shadows" satisfy your needs and please your deeds. See ya on tour folks!