This blog post will be a little longer. It will contain an update on the album but also lots more. Hope you’ll stay with me.

2020. What a fucked up year. The year that was supposed to change everything for the better. On micro and macro and universal and multi-universal levels, and on all levels in between. Personally I had massive hopes because my expectation bar was set very low. Last year I went through a divorce and a period of anxiety, where I was not sure if anything made any sense anymore. I was more lost than I usually am. But little by little, and through discovering small rays of light, things started to fall into place again. My son is my everything and he has been such a trooper through all of this. My north star and purpose. The song ‘Dark’ on the new album is for him.

Other positive things happened too, obviously including great progress with the album. There were high expectations for 2020 and the song ‘Shine’ covers a great deal of that on a personal level (“We’ve traveled far and given up, now everything will be all right”). But then…

First, we almost had World War 3 starting in the middle East with fucktard Trump doing what he does. Then, this interconnected world really showed its darkest side by a virus spreading like wildfire, isolating us from each other. I feel for those locked up with people they cannot live with and fearing for their safety. I feel for those locked up alone and feeling desperate to have any human interaction. I feel for those trying to work, teach their kids and live a meaningful life, all at once. I feel especially much for those who have loved ones in other locations and not able to be with them. I feel for those losing their livelihoods; for those losing their mental or physical health; and for those losing their loved ones. As a band we were spared of direct impacts of the virus and also lucky in that our last recording day was right before Finland closed up, so we got everything done as planned. There are no Covid or isolation songs on the album for obvious reasons, and we also decided not to name the album with any reference to the virus and its impact. However, we will always associate the album with this weird spring of 2020. There is no record release party planned or any other gigs for that matter. Everything is still on hold and it’s weird af.

Just when things started to look a little better, the “greatest nation on earth” decides to show its true colors: Blue (a militant and racist police force), white (like the KKK hoods) and red (the blood of innocent black people). The videos we’ve seen in the last week are sick. The racism is deep in the DNA of white colonialism, and when that is combined with this weird fetish of being an authority with permission to use force, you see how ugly and disgusting us people can be. I wrote the song ‘Surreal Experiment’ when they put immigrant and refugee kids in cages in the US. Its opening line goes “This is a surreal experiment in the age of post-intellect”. I don’t know if humanity can be – or should be – saved. We are too often horrible to each other.

On that happy note, we are brought to today. I promised this blog post would include an update on the album. I won’t reveal the name yet, but the album has a title and we like it. It was one of the hardest decisions to make as a group. It took several votes and discussions. Other difficult decisions were song selections and song order. Damn… We know that very few listen to full length albums anymore, but we wanted the song order to make sense. Yes, we’ll put our marketing effort into singles, as we’re not stupid, but the album has to work as an album too, and it took several iterations to get it right. We ended up with 13 songs. It was supposed to be 12, but then Hiili suggested switching two songs, which we kind of did, but ended up keeping both. It’s still only roughly 41 minutes so we trust people can deal with it being longer than a debut album should.

The next weeks we will spend looking at options for distribution. We have one option on the table but want to balance that our with others too. Maybe a traditional record label would pick us up with a traditional record label deal, who knows? It’s not easy to sell english rock music in Finland and our target is not hundreds of thousands of streams in Finland only. Artistically we have pretty much reached our target. We made the record with the best current songs we have and we can be proud of the way it sounds. Commercially, our targets are beyond the Finnish borders and in live gigs. Nobody makes money from streams, but if we can get on playlists and radios, and generate enough excitement for when the gig scene returns, then we aim to get on as many stages as possible, and not just in Finland.

There. That’s it. That’s the blog post. Stay tuned. Or tanned. Or both. But use sun screen, ok.

Be well.

Lasse / Flush