Since 1991, Finnish frontman Ville Valo has been the vaunted gothic priest of a generation of metalheads with a soft centre.
He expanded the music ecology under the HIM band banner with a subgenre he appropriately coined love metal – the title of their illustrious fourth album – and symbolised their sonic revolution with an arcuate-topped pentagram, adoringly branded the Heartagram.
26 years of being the gothic poster boy for the most commercially successful Finnish bands of all time came at a cost to the highly sought-after rock god. As quickly as the accolades came, so did the bitter trials of fast fame; the attention, the hypersexualisation and scrutiny from the media, the substance abuse, and, of course, visits from the mental health demons.
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“It was very intense…It seems I woke up from the slumber, that zombified state of being in a gothic boy band for Love Metal,” Valo explains.
“I was definitely out of my depth. It felt very uncomfortable at times and not only for that [sexualisation]. It just felt like we were taken from the middle of nowhere into the big wide world and there’s a lot of firsts and a lot of things we didn’t know when, what and how to deal with…It was a good mess. Somebody has to go through it. So it’s good for mankind; small steps for me, but massive steps for mankind.”
The final nail in the band’s career coffin came on 5 March 2017. Black eyeliner bled from the eyes of fans around the world at the death of HIM, burying with them eight multi-award-winning studio albums. Whilst fans longed for a HIM resurrection, Valo took a detour to Finnish schlager group, Agents, but it wouldn’t be long before the darkness would lace his heart again.
With the twin alliteration of his name condensed to a sharp VV, Valo’s reincarnation is marked by an echoing titular double, Neon Noir. Spawning from the toe-dip three-track EP titled Gothica Fennica, Neon Noir continues Valo’s descent into the melancholic maelstrom.
“This is a continuation of the same thing more or less and that is because that is the only way I know how to communicate, musically speaking. I was trying to change my stripes, but I couldn’t. I always found myself in a similar spot musically because, at the end of the day, aurally you’re trying to please yourself and it seems that those same things still tend to please me,” he admits.
Bleeding his entire self into the Emma Award Best Rock Album of 2024, writing and undertaking all instrumentation in solitude, Neon Noir is more than an exterior glow. It has reignited Valo’s internal flame.
“I felt that I needed to challenge myself and be a tad egotistical once again and let it be known that it’s all about me, me, me,” he laughs.
“I think it’s been endearing for such an old dog like myself to find new avenues of being creative and the newness of it all. I think it’s a good idea for everybody to become a solo artist at least once in their lifetime.”
Whilst a pandemic size pit and pendulum (a Poe reference that finally spilled from Valo’s pen on ‘Heartful of Ghosts’), plagued this project, career collaborators, companions and life constants Mikko “Mige” Paananen, and album co-producer, Tim Palmer, helped pull Valo to the neon lights.
“Maybe a tad too much I got lost in the woods at times, but that’s what you have to do. You have to be a bit kooky and get even a bit crazier in the process of making music and making an album. It has to be all-encompassing. It has to take over. It is like a demonic possession of sorts, an album making is,” he jokes, twitching a pearly-white smile.
“Mige, the bass player of HIM, came to my studio during the pandemic and gave me the thumbs up, thumbs down regarding the work I was doing while also checking whether I’m in a good place, mentally speaking…and Tim was able to understand what I was going for and also give me the sort of kick in the butt when I was losing my hope.”
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The harsh cold and a 3 pm night sky drowning the city of Helsinki – a stark contrast to the sun-soaked setting greeting him this month on his Australian tour – yet again cocooned Valo in a melancholic stupor of hope-lost, both lyrically etched on the gravestone of Neon Noir and tangled in its entwined 80’s gloom/pop web.
That misery still seeping into his songwriting seems to have escaped Valo somewhat in disposition. His naked eyes, cleansed of his signature smudged black eyeliner, scintillate with pride as he discusses his rebirth. Years of concern for his condition and wellbeing have dissipated.
This sober, focused, reincarnated version of Ville Valo embodies another double alliteration; happy and healthy.
“[Neon Noir] has given myself a reason to be, to exist, as music always does…I’m happy to have found out that there are new things to learn about music and new things to get inspired by.”
Catch Ville Valo at Northcote Theatre on Friday 15 March. Tickets to the VV/HIM cocktail are available at Moshtix
