“I n the beginning, this wasn’t even supposed to be a real band,” muses Swallow The Sun vocalist Mikko Kotamäki. “We recorded the first demo. Then, all of a sudden, we got a shitty record deal, ended up recording the whole album and we accidentally became a real band.”
Having joined Swallow The Sun as an “underage kid” at just 16, Kotamäki now can’t remember a time when this wasn’t his life. The band was formed as a casual project in 2000 by guitarist and songwriter Juha Raivo. He had just seen My Dying Bride live in Finland, and wanted to make music that emulated the English doom veterans’ gothic melancholy. It would be three years until Swallow The Sun played their first gig, a low-key affair in a snowy, remote Finnish village. “We drove home in our friend’s RV and it was fucking cold,” says Kotamäki, smiling at the memory. “It was the middle of the winter, we had blankets because the heating system wasn’t working. It was maybe minus 20˚c.”