Text: Anne-Marie Forker
Photo: Guilty Visuals & Lucy Alienne Visuals
Let’s go back to the beginning. How did Luna Kills form?
Me and our guitarist (Samuli Paasineva) are actually cousins, so we’ve known each other our whole life, so to say. He actually convinced me in 2015 or something like that to join him in another band, before Luna Kills. We kind of formed from there into Luna Kills. Then we had our bassist (Lassi Peltonen) join. We’ve had a couple of drum players, so to say, but Jimi (Kinnunen) was introduced to us last spring and he was such a sick drummer. He’s the baby of the band in a way.
You have a jazz singing background, but obviously having heard the album it’s much more than that. You’re screaming and growling as well, and have a beautiful clean singing voice. Is the growling hard to transition to?
New techniques are always new techniques but I don’t really feel that it’s hard because I’ve learnt it that way, so, it’s just something I do. It has taken a lot of time to learn all the techniques because I have multiple different things that I do with my voice. I actually started screaming two years ago. It was the first time I really started going towards extreme vocals. So, that’s the newest thing that I have learnt. I’m really excited because it’s the first time that I’ve actually learnt something new in a very long time. I’m really eager to learn it and get into it even more.
How did you learn?
I opened up YouTube. There’s so much stuff on the internet. I had thought about screaming a bit but I tried it when I was 15 years old. It was so bad that I offended myself and I made a promise to myself that I will never do it. But, you know, two years ago, I thought, “okay, now it’s time for me to learn something new” and try to get something new out of my voice. So, I just opened up YouTube and started to watch different tutorials. I think I learned it by the end of the week. Then we went into the studio and I screamed and then we had to go and do live shows.
That’s really fast!
I think because I have a good technique in regards to my other type of vocals, so when you have a really good base, it’s easier to build up on it.
What’s the inspiration for the title of the album, “Deathmatch”?
We are huge gamers so it’s a gaming reference. It’s a gaming mode where you try to take out your opponents in the server as fast as you can, as many times as you can, within a round. The album deals with mental health related issues and things like depression and anxiety. So the title also refers to a person and the negative things that you are struggling yourself, and it’s almost like playing a death match against yourself. It has multiple different things that it refers to.
Do you have similar taste in music to each other?
Yeah. We love to listen to different sort of genres and artists and bands, but we do have similar favourite artists that we listen to on regular basis. We all like Muse.
Me too!
I have a Matt Bellamy tattoo!
Nice! I met him randomly at a snooker match. A song from your album that stood out was “Sugar Rush”. What was the inspiration behind that?
We were actually having a really hard time at the time of writing that song, a little bit of writer’s block. We had very little time before our studio session was coming up. Maybe we were going towards a burnout or something like that. We had so little time and so much to do, and we were not feeling the music we were writing. Then we just took a little moment to calm myself down, and we figured that we should just write something, not for the album, not for Luna Kills. We just should make music and have some sort of joy and happiness in the moment, because sometimes if you focus too much on something, it’s just not going to happen. So, we figured that even if it’s a country song let’s just write something and get it out of our system, and then we can have a clear head, but when we started to write the song, it actually started to feel like it was sounding really good, and it had something we liked about it. It felt like a huge “sugar rush” when we started writing it, because it gave us that shot of dopamine, melody and everything. The lyrics reflect that moment a little bit, it reflected on things like imposter syndrome when you are feeling like you’re not measuring up to the world, and the feeling of when you have to run from deadline to deadline and your passions start to feel like a burden. Now it’s time to get some of the joy back and try to have that sugar rush from music.
Which was the song that was the most difficult to complete, and which was the easiest?
The most difficult to complete was “Fever Dream” because it’s the oldest of the songs that we have in the album, and it was completely different song when we eventually figured it out. It had big riffs and it had hooks and a different type of energy when we first started to make it. But then, the message in the song is really about when you are depressed and you just feel a little bit numb and powerless, and you just want to sleep, and the instrumentals were not complementing the feeling. For me, it really needs to be mellow. So, eventually we stripped everything from it and we made it as it is, a vocally centred song which evolves into that big crescendo. It was the toughest one to figure out for sure, but when we tapped into the idea of it being really mellow, then it started to write itself. The easiest song from the album was probably “Leech” because when we first made the chorus and the synth hook for the song, we immediately knew what we wanted the song to be like, and what we wanted it to sound like. So, the demo came really fast. I think we wrote it in a week or something like that.
You’ve just announced your first ever headline European and UK tour. How important is playing live to you?
Very important. Luna Kills as a band started because we wanted to play live, we really love playing live and it’s a nice moment to have between us and the audience. To see how the music impacts the audience in real time is really important for us. It’s something we really love to do.
Are you planning to play much of the new album live?
Yeah, definitely. We’re actually having a show this week and we are planning to play the whole album live. It depends on the set times we have but we’re going to play as much as we can from the album.
Good luck with the album release, and thank you so much for your time today!
Thank you so much for having me! Have a great Monday. Bye!
First published in Norway Rock Magazine #2/2025