Of Of Woe or: The second look into our brand new album

Last time we talked about one of the oldest songs on the album. Turns out this one is nearly as old, but it feels more fresh to us and it certainly sounds more fresh. Read on to find out why.

Haunted

Otto: I originally wrote this song pretty much verbatim how it ended up in the album, excluding the extended outro part. Originally the song just faded away once it transitioned from the main riff to the clean part. However, as we rehearsed this song, it tended to end up with extended jam parts and whatnot, so we figured out that there was probably some room to expand this song. What resulted was a bass solo, an extended guitar solo, a clean vocal interlude and a new, more powerful outro.

I remember originally presenting this song to Henri and he just discarded the idea off the bat, as the song didn't sound like us, according to him. I disagreed, but decided to wait. The next time I presented the song he was totally open to the song and we took it into our rehearsal regime.

Henri: I like to think we grew into the song, Otto just happened to be ahead of his time when writing it. In any case, I, too, am glad we added it into the repertoire.

Otto: Currently this is definitely one of my favorite songs of the album, if not even THE favorite. And why wouldn't it be? After all, in addition to being doomy as hell, it has got two very distinct guitar solos, a death metal part, a goddamn bass solo, really odd time signatures (at times even several different meters going on at the same time) and great clean parts. It's really one hell of a song.

Henri: I think the death metal part is more like thrash metal, though that is open for discussion. And that gives me a segue to mention that due to Niko’s insistence, we bumped the tempo up a notch in that part. We’d practiced it a bit slower and the increase in tempo made it quite hard for Otto and me to properly downpick the riff, not to mention how Otto was in a bit of a rush during the solo.

Otto: Despite these tempo-related difficulties, I'm pretty glad how the guitar solos turned out to be. I wanted this faster first one to be short, abrupt and somewhat atonal to suit the feel of the aggressive death / thrash metal part, whereas I wanted the second one to contrast the earlier parts by having more of an airy, Pink Floyd vibe to it with a clean guitar tone and some nice, soulful bends.

Henri: I tried to remember if I wrote the lyrics to this first, or this very short piece of prose (in Finnish) that was basically the same thing. Had to check it and the lyrics came first. Probably would have been cooler the other way around, but oh well. The clean bit at the very end was added considerably later, though, and that is also where the album title originally comes from, “icy fingers creep in slow / the ever-circling wolves of woe”, though later we decided to add the subtitle.



Of Woe or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Gloom is out now on our Bandcamp page as well as Spotify, Google Play, iTunes etc.