After the excellent Down and awe-inspiring Frozen, the band began to receive some much-deserved recognition, ending up with a gold record in their homeland for the latter and a great deal of airplay.  Just this past month, the band's latest opus, Crimson, was released to usher in the year 2000 in style.  Guitarist Sami Lopakka gives us the details behind this album and other activities related to the Northernmost Killers...

How has the response to Crimson been so far?
Well, the album has only been out for a week here in Europe, but so far the critics have been very good all over.  It was the Album of the Month in many magazines, including Metal Hammer of Germany, one of the biggest ones.  We just heard that after one week, it is #1 on the charts in Finland.  So, it has been really good, but we still have to wait for a while to get the real reaction from real people.

What are your feelings about the album?
We are totally satisfied with the album.  It turned out just the way that we wanted it to be and we worked on it for almost a year, from the first note to this final result.  So it was pretty satisfying to get it done finally and the result we got finally from all these 4 studios that we were in while recording this.  It's a relief that it is now ready and everything went fine, so we have nothing to complain about - no regrets about it.  Now we're just waiting to get people's reaction and getting to play these songs live.

I understand you were more involved with the production on Crimson?  Were you at all nervous about doing the production on this album yourselves? 
Not really, because we've been around for almost-- not almost, we've been around for ten years and we trust ourselves that much that maybe we can have our own opinions about something and maybe we finally know what we are doing.  On the other hand, we also had this kind of co-producer who was with us all the time and he was taking care of all the technical side that the studio has, so we could concentrate completely on the music and the playing itself.

Do you think you will go that route next time too?
It's too early to say.  It could be we will work the same way next time as we did on Crimson, but I just couldn't say yet.  We keep changing music-wise, so we also keep changing production-wise.

Why did you decide to sequence the tracks so that each song led directly into the next?
I think the songs have kind of a relation to each other and it's not very interesting to put one song and then four seconds or five seconds of nothing and then the next song.  We just wanted to do something different and with these songs, it was pretty easy to do it because they fit together quite easily.  On the other hand, the songs are really quite different from each other, so the atmosphere keeps changing.  In the mastering, it was possible to make a whole package of all the songs, and we just took that possibility.

How was "Killing Me, Killing You" chosen for the first single?
It was kind of a hard choice for us, because there are like four or five songs that could have been the one, so we had to ask some people that are close to us and also Hiili, the co-producer, and some other people what they think.  But in the end it was pretty obvious because you need to have this four-minute edit of the song for the radio stations and for that song, it was really easy to cut it in pieces and make this edit, and it's also a catchy song, so maybe it was a commercial choice as well.

I understand you did a video for the song, too.  Can you describe it a bit?
Yeah, we went to northern Norway for the video, to a place that is almost the northernmost place that you can go on Earth by car this time of year.  We were shooting it on the shores of the Arctic Sea and it was very cold there.  We had to take little breaks all the time, just to keep our fingers moving.  I think you can actually see from the video how cold it is.  This freezing atmosphere gives another aspect to the song itself, so it was an interesting process.  It's kind of hard to explain a video in words, so maybe you should just check it out if you have the possibility.

I don't know if they would ever play it over here.
Yeah, I know the situation over there. (laughs)

Who directed it?
It was a Finnish guy and I don't think he has done anything international yet.  He is rising in the business, but he is very talented and the video seems a lot more expensive than it really is, so he will be known worldwide someday.

The cover art on Crimson is very striking.  Did Niklas come up with the entire concept himself or did you suggest some of the ideas?
Yeah, we were working together, but he did all the art.  He was giving us different motifs and different kind of stuff for each page and the cover and we just picked out what we wanted.  It was very easy this way.  He always put the new designs on the Internet, on his home page, then we could check it out right then and decide what we wanted to change and what we don't want to change.  But in the end, we really have to give him all the credit about the cover.

I understand you played a ten-year anniversary show in your hometown around Christmas.  How did that go?
It was very good, we were surprised how good it was.  The place here in Oulu was packed, we had almost a thousand people and we had little special things planned for it, like we played songs that we hadn't played for many years.  We did songs from almost every album that we ever did, it was pretty interesting.  It was the first time in five years and I think probably the last, too.  It went very good but it just didn't feel right.  The people were excited though, so what the hell?

You also did a show on New Year's Eve.  What was that like?
That wasn't as good.  I think this whole millennium thing was like over-advertised.  We had 700 people in there, but if I compare it to the anniversary show, it was nothing special.  The whole new year was just another day that fucking sucked.  It had no meaning to me personally and I think maybe it had some effect on the show itself, as well.  We just took care of it and got drunk like hell.

The theme of love comes up a lot in your lyrics.  With all the potential for pain, do you feel like love is a worthy goal to be pursued?
Yeah, I think so.  In the end, there are not many positive sides in life, but love is one of them and you should aim at it no matter the cost.  Even the pain that comes with it is better than nothing, or boredom.

One of my favorite lines is in the song "Farewell," where you wrote "...The enchantment lies in the moment of good-byes..."  Can you explain a little bit about what inspired this line?
That one was written by Ville, the vocalist [d'oh!!--ed.] but I can relate to him pretty good.  This kind of thinking is so natural for us.  All the depression and all the negative things in life, in some way they are romantic to us.  Any time we write music, we write the music first and then write lyrics from the feeling that we get from the music.  When the music is quite sad, it always turns out that the lyrics are that way, too.  Having romantic views over death or good-byes, it's just something that has strong emotion and it's interesting to deal with these kinds of things in our lyrics. 

Another line I like is at the end of "Grave Sweet Grave:"  "...the dawn shall steal my dreams no more..."  Do you think there is some kind of connection between death and dreams?
No, not really.  The song starts with the words, 'I have seen my funeral in a thousand dreams' and the last line is kind of hoping that this time it wouldn't be a dream.  About death in general, I really hope there is no afterlife or another life waiting for us.  I hope this life is enough and we suffer enough. (laughs)

When Frozen was re-issued in the digi-pack, why was the track order re-arranged?
Well, this whole thing was not something we were comfortable with, releasing the whole album again with these 4 cover tracks, but we had these covers and the idea was to put them out with Frozen again.  We wanted to make the digipak of Frozen a little bit different, more than just to have a couple of extra songs that aren't even our songs.  There's no special reason, just that we wanted to have something different.

Did ever consider just releasing a MCD instead or was the whole thing the record company's idea?
Yeah, more or less.  There are two sides to music - the artistic side and the business side - and you just have to find a way to make it satisfactory for everyone.

Was it difficult choosing the tracks for the Greatest Kills collection?
Yeah, it kind of was.  Already when that came out, we had quite a bit of songs and of course there some obvious choices, like "Nepenthe" and "Noose" and "Awaiting the Winter Frost," but then we had to leave so many songs out that we would have liked to have been there.  You just have to limit it to something and it was kind of difficult, but it turned out okay and all the songs there represent some time in our history.

Do you keep up much on what is happening in the metal scene at large?
I'm not very much following it and the one reason for that is that I don't have much time.  This band is already taking so much of our time, we don't have any more time to give to music.  When we are rehearsing for three hours and I come home, the first thing in mind is not music.  I've had so many disappointments when checking out all the new bands, usually the all are just full of crap, like 98% are a total waste of time - a waste of time that I don't have.  So I just wait and let the music find me.  If I'm interested in some band, I believe that sooner or later, it will find me and I don't have to look for it all the time.

Do the guys in the band hang out much outside of actual band activities?
Eh, not much, but we hang out sometime during the weeks.  We all live near Oulu here in northern Finland, so we see each other whenever we go to a bar or so on.  So, maybe a couple of times a month outside the band.

Is there any chance of a US tour this year for Sentenced?
We are making decisions right now and we decided that in the spring, we will do a lot of Finnish shows and all the big European festivals and the Finnish festivals in the summer.  After that, we are doing both, like a full European tour headlining and also it seems that we're coming to the States finally, in September or so.  We'll tour with Iced Earth for 3 weeks or so.

Great!  Are you looking forward to that?
Yeah, we are.  We've been getting so much response from there.  We've got this e-mail address that people can send any of their comments or questions to, and we receive a lot of messages from the States and they all are asking, 'Why aren't you coming?' and 'Why haven't you come already?' and 'When are you coming?'  It seems that at least some people over there even like our music, so maybe there is even a reason to come.