Hello, everybody. We're here today with Viktor and Jarkko from Brymir. So, how are you guys doing?

Viktor — Oh, pretty good. We actually just had band practice, so we're still a bit out of breath. We have a really long set now. We've been playing these shorter festival sets for a while and haven't been playing live much at all. So, we're preparing for our first headliner show in a long time, tomorrow actually, and the practice went really well. Right, Jarkko?

Jarkko — Yeah, it leaves you hungry for tomorrow, but yeah, it went well.

Viktor — And it also leaves you a little bit nervous. Like, if the practice goes very well the day before, then you get nervous. “Oh, tomorrow, is it gonna work?”

Jarkko — If there's some room for improvement, then you're sharp, you know? Like, “Okay, I'll focus on this one.”

Viktor — Yeah, exactly. If the last practice before a show is really bad, then everybody's like, you know, really focused. But if the practice is really good, then it's like, “Oh, I can do this.” And then you're going to start going, “Oh my God, this is so fast.”

That's great.

And are you going to play an unreleased song tomorrow, or not?

Viktor — Yeah, we're gonna play a lot of stuff from the new album. And tomorrow, we're also gonna have a pre-listening session before the show, just to get the fans, you know, because we had to start this kind of album release tour a couple of weeks before the actual album comes out.

So we're gonna do it tomorrow, and I hope we'll also be able to fit it into every show until the album is released, just to give the fans a chance to come and listen to the album before they hear the songs live, so they can judge how it's supposed to go and how it actually went.

So, this album, What We Leave Behind, will be out on October 2. Do you have one word to describe it? Why?

Viktor — Dark.

Jarkko — Dark, yeah. For us.

Viktor — Well, throughout the whole process of writing this album, and even just going into the process of writing it, personally, as the main songwriter, I was not in a good place mentally. And generally in life, I had too much on my plate, signed up for too many things, had too many responsibilities, like in addition to the band stuff.

And yeah, just already going into the process, making a record this intense while already being exhausted… It's, you know, a pretty dark omen. And also, at the same time, all these crazy things started happening all over the world.

So many conflicts are breaking out. And yeah, actually, when I started writing this album, I think AI wasn't even on the table at that time. So, that whole kind of very big shift in, you know, everything in society is affected by this. This and all this happened during the process of writing this album.

And it's pretty scary. So yeah, there's, like, so many scary and horrible things happening around the world. And plus everything that we went through individually, I wasn't the only one having a difficult time.

And the songs, because the songs from Brymir have always been, or at least on our previous three albums, like, since Wings of Fire, we've been getting more and more personal with the songs. We might describe it, you know, or dress it up with metaphors from mythology.

But they are all really personal stories. And this one has the, you know, the most dense, you know, densely packed, just, you know, very, very dark times of our lives, you know, described through the mythology and, you know, the language that we used to express ourselves with. So, yeah, it's going to be very therapeutic to be able to play these things live.

And yeah, it's like going to therapy, like writing an album when you have to reveal this stuff, that you're lying to yourself about many things, or trying to convince yourself that something is like this, just to protect yourself from feelings of shame or guilt or whatever.

Writing songs is, at least for me, a great way to kind of access these difficult thoughts that you don't even want to think about consciously. So when you write songs, even when you're not even at the lyrics, just writing the music itself, you often kind of tap into something real, a real experience.

That's why it's so nice to have this mythology as a language that you can use to express yourself. You can really reveal or tell very personal things and private things that you don't want to tell anybody. Of course, I can tell Jarkko anything, but, you know, really private things. And I can talk about them out loud in front of thousands of people, but still feel comfortable because I know the whole, the full story behind everything.

And the listeners that are well-versed in Norse mythology and science fiction and other things that we take metaphors from, they can interpret the stories, the true stories behind them. But at least for me, it's very healing to be able to say these things out loud, you know.

Yes. I mean, I've always heard that it's kind of cathartic for musicians, but it's also cathartic for the fans when they listen to that kind of song.

Viktor — Yeah. I hope that this record might help some people process the same things, you know, or face their demons like I did creating this record. For me, at least, even if it's the darkest album we've made, for me, it's the most healing one. And I hope it will be for others as well.

That's good. And actually, I feel like through the titles, through the tracks, it feels like there's a story being told to us through the album. Is there a story that you wanted to tell through the record?

Jarkko — It's sort of weird that we always, like, for our songwriting process, it's very sort of insular in the sense that we write these songs always just one after another. They're always just very individual pieces. We always get these comments that there's this overarching narrative and very much like an album that you have to listen to from beginning to the very end.

But then our writing process… For instance, Viktor thinks about songs, they're very individual things. So it's almost accidental how these things just sort of fit in perfectly. And then there emerges this overarching narrative.

Even I myself, now that I've looked at it and we've juggled the individual songs around, I can sort of see that there is this kind of thing emerging, but it's so sort of on an abstract level that you can sort of… you can project a sort of an individual story that starts here and goes into this. You could also take it from one person's perspective that goes through this journey.

But then I don't know, it feels for me like it's sort of a stretch of projection. But that's what our brains tend to do, that we want to see stories in that. And it's really what works there on the album. It's almost an accident every time.

Viktor — Yeah, or, like, an accident is maybe, you know, maybe the first time we got lucky, but you learn things when you work together for this long. You learn so much about each other and about the thing you're doing that it's just somehow subconsciously, you might create a larger kind of whole than you were thinking that you are creating.

But here also the song What We Leave Behind; it's an individual story. It's a very sad story about heartbreak and regret. And about leaving something behind and regretting it later. Like, “why did I leave it?”

You know, when it's too late to come back, you realize when you reach your destination that you shouldn't have left in the first place.

But then What We Leave Behind, it's a pretty deep question. You can apply it to so many things, and it just all happened by accident or whatever it is, magic? That this What We Leave Behind is a relevant kind of question that you can apply to every song in its own way.

Some of them are more personal, like, “what did I leave behind? What do I want to leave behind? What are we leaving behind as a civilization?”

“And what kind of world do we want to leave for the next generation?”

And out of the two songs that were already released, this one was the first one. So why did you choose it? I mean, is this the reason you chose it as the track to introduce this new album, this new bunch of stories?

Viktor — It's just like, from the songs on the album, it has some really fresh kind of approach and elements that are kind of new to us, to use in our toolkit for songwriting. But it's still so somehow inherently Brymir, that it's like a combination of new and then the very strong identity that we have.

And also maybe because it was kind of the first song, even though there are songs from the album which are older, you know, or that we started writing them much, much, much earlier. Jarkko, for example, wrote the last song… When did you write it, Jarkko?

Jarkko — I started writing that song… Back in ’22, I think.

Its first iteration started before there even was a Brymir. It was a totally different genre. And then it's been worked on, iterated over and over again for the past 20 years. So there is old material there.

But yeah, What We Leave Behind was basically what sort of kickstarted this album process in itself. It was the first one that sort of started, “OK, this is what we're heading towards.”

And on that album, we still get the heaviness. And we also have that kind of orchestral vibe that you worked on too, with that choir on The Roaring King, things like that. So I'm a bit curious about the process in the studio, and if there's something you've experimented with on that album that you've never experimented with before.

Viktor — Yeah. We used to have much more symphonic orchestral arrangements for our songs. And we used to, earlier in our career, write songs and write them in a different software, or with guitar, and then you plan all these arrangements.

But only at the end of the process, when you're mixing in the studio, then you realize that, “oh, shit… How are we going to manage to fit all this in?” It's like having a cup of water which is overflowing.

And it's been a learning curve since then. And with every album, we've been able to get a bit further ahead.

And now we've finally reached the kind of situation where I already do them in the same software that I use for making the final mixes. So you already know the kind of mold that you're going for. You can kind of already, in songwriting and pre-production, make decisions that are final instead of just having a million things and then going to the studio and then sorting out the mess later.

Like they say in movies, “It's fixed in post-production.”

So now we're able to do, fix or, avoid creating problematic situations with arrangements. There's been a huge growth in songwriting. Also, like, I'm not a guitarist myself, but I work with Joona, our guitar player, for so long with Brymir.

And also, I've worked recording Battle Beast, and I've learned so much about guitar work from working with him that I can write riffs, you know, and I sometimes even know Joona's limits better than himself.

I can write stuff for him that he thinks that it's too hard sometimes. But then when I show him how to play it, it sounds stupid because I'm the worst guitarist. But I still can teach Joona sometimes, like “just if you do it like this, then it works”.

So, yeah, we've really grown as songwriters and the whole process is more controlled and better designed from day one.

Jarkko — I think if we'd have to say, what's new in this that people can hear, maybe it's the boldness of your choices. We're not doing so many of these orchestral things this time around, but they're more synth-like. Even in the title track, there's this almost like a very bold, trance influence there, and using this sort of electronic music sounds and that sort of aesthetic, that's probably the newest, or that people might not expect from us that much, even though we've played with those elements in the past, but now they're much more in the open.

Viktor — Yeah, and also, using that kind of abstract art kind of approach, you know; making soundscapes… That helps you create perspective and adds elements to the songs which are not inherently straight-up musical things, but they're sound design things which stem also from my experiences working with sound design for film. Yeah, it's more like the perspective is - I don't know, at least for me - it's more 3D, you know.

But it's about perspective, about the angle from which you look at something. The same thing applies to sound, and yeah, there's something about this album which, maybe in the past, we've had so much going on all the time. Like, there's guitar leads and super-fast drums and orchestras and choirs, everything going on at the same time. And now with this record, there are some moments that might feel even more powerful because we've learned to leave a little bit more room before the super-powerful part, instead of just, you know, putting mega-powerful parts after each other.

Yeah. And you even got that on three songs, including the opening track, where you got the intro and then you got the song that's all powerful.  So what's the process behind it? What did you want to do with it? Was it originally one track that you split in two?

Viktor — Yeah, kind of. When we were doing the mastering, we were really thinking about, like, “where do we cut?” But because basically, they might have originally been, like, two different things.

But then when you write the songs and produce the album, they grow together, they become one. So then it's like “where do you cut?”

Some of them are really an instrumental thing as a kind of prelude or something for the next thing, and just to leave some space for instrumental parts.

I think it also helps with this, like I said, perspective thing, you know. You sometimes go really small and then you go big. It leaves more and more dynamic range.

Jarkko — The way we've thought about it is like “there's this intro that's on a separate track and then it goes into the next song.” It also has to do not only with the sort of drama of it, but also the realities of playlist culture and everything like that.

When the song starts, you want to be able to take it apart and get to the good part fast. In nowadays' culture, it makes sense to put a cut there so that you can separate the song from the intro. That also makes sense. That's also something we had to think about a bit. But when you listen to the album, it sort of doesn't matter where the cut is, I think. The music is still there.

Yeah, I agree with that. And you were talking about the aesthetic of the sound, but I want to talk about the aesthetic of the visuals, because that album cover, I feel, really matches with the previous one, Voices in the Sky. But not with the ones before, really. Like, how did you come to that kind of new visual aspect?

Viktor — Well, we've been working really hard on trying to distance ourselves from this outright folk metal, you know, kind of brand that's been strongly associated with Brymir, even though we haven't really been a folk metal band since our first album, which was ages ago.

And now, already with the previous album, we tried to have the music videos are set in a modern, “in today,” you know. There's this one music video which has different epochs represented, but it's kind of like “we're living in today”.

But now we wanted to push it even further, and with a science fiction aesthetic, because it's to confuse listeners in a good way, so that they hopefully kind of forget this folk metal association.

Because I think it just leaves much more room for the listener to experience the songs and interpret what we're saying, you know, in their own terms, instead of forcing a predefined premise. With some bands,you might have a very beautiful, emotional song, but because it is a folk metal band, for example Moonsorrow or Finntroll,whatever you do, when you close your eyes, you're in the forest or you're on a Viking ship or something like this.

But I would like for the listener, when they listen to it and close their eyes, that they can place the story anywhere that's relevant for them.

Jarkko — Yeah. And the artwork itself, we had the second and third album made by Claudio Bergamin, we had this good working relationship with him. And then, last album, we had Tuomas Rauhalainen.

I don't think I can remember how he came up with these steps into the album cover art aesthetics. We wanted, for the last album, something different. And now the newest album cover actually is made by Samuli Ponsimaa Skrymer, from Finntroll, he makes all the album art for them.

And we became good friends with him when we toured with Finntroll in ’22. And it was just sort of a natural evolution. The instructions were : “do some sort of sci-fi, cool stuff, take him also out of that sort of trollish, fairy forest that he's more well known from.”

And then he delivered that album art. And we were like, “yes, this is exactly what we're going for.” Like, there's this radical, more freedom of putting our songs in the place in your mind's eye; so it's not set in stone. It's sort of the way the art, the album art works and the visuals have evolved.

I don't know, how would you describe the process of how it's evolved? It's like, just naturally. Have we really thought about it that much? Other than that, we just want to have this freedom of puttinh the songs in any sort of environment that comes naturally to you when you close your eyes and you listen to the song.

Viktor — Yeah. For this album, I just wanted to have something different, something new. And yeah, we became very good friends with Samuli.

And one reason why we bonded so quickly is because, growing up, even though he's a few years older, we still had the same kind of influences, like the same fantasy and science fiction universes that we were very passionate about. So it was really easy, like, “Oh, I love this stuff.” “I love this stuff.”

Oh, and he was really excited when we suggested something like science fiction, he was really excited to be able to get a chance to draw something sci-fi instead of what he is often doing, which is stuff from nature and this fantasy like lore.

Yeah, he mixed things up. But we're very much a music-first-and-foremost band.

And, the album and the artwork is more like an afterthought. For many bands, it feels like they have almost the other way around. They're going first, like, “Okay, this is the movie that we're gonna make the soundtrack for.”

We wanna make the soundtrack. And the audience creates the movie for themselves.

That is really nice! This is going to be my final question. Do you have a message for the people listening to you?

Viktor — Believe in your dreams. And never stop trying. Hard work pays off. And even when the world feels at its darkest, it will probably get better. So yeah, take it easy, take a breath, and everything's gonna be alright. And listen to Brymir!

Jarkko — I think that's a pretty good sum-up there. Can't really think of anything. It's kind of hard to formulate a sort of message that we want to say, 'cause we always want to give the audience the power of mulling over these messages and feelings and finding their own catharsis and conclusions. I think Viktor said it quite well!

Viktor — Also, we can add the classic that I also wanna say: we are coming for you. Wherever you are in the world. And we're gonna perform for you, and I think we're gonna have a really fun time together. So check out our new album and come see us live when you have the chance!

Thank you for your time and kindness!

Viktor & Jarkko — Thank you!