Karjalasta is an instrumental introduction to the musical themes of the album. Since classical music and symphonic grandeur are essential to the kind of music my mind produces, it felt natural to begin the album with a somewhat ominous classical piece, which soon transitions into symphonic death metal riffing. These two themes are the most present throughout the entire album and serve as the glue holding it together.

Since the lyrical themes of the album were already clear, I also wanted the intro to provide some sort of thematic lyrical introduction. After listening to old radio speeches, interviews, and documentaries for several days, the speech that was chosen for the track was Justice Minister Ernst von Born's radio speech to the Finnish people on September 19, 1944, the day the peace treaty was signed. This speech informed the Finnish people of the war’s end, but also of the peace terms, which were very difficult for many to accept.

The theme of the album is not war, not warmongering, nor the glorification of war, but the Karelian cultural heritage, which is closely tied to the land that ceased to be in Finnish possession from that day onward. This radio speech at the beginning of the album marked the end of the millennia-long era of Finnish-Karelian history, which the songs on the album reflect, each in their own way.

Kajahtaa is the fastest and most aggressive song on the album. The guitar themes first existed in my mind at a much slower tempo, but I wanted to include a fast track where rhythmic themes would draw from influences like At The Gates, Dissection, and other legendary Swedish bands, as they've always been strong inspirations in my own playing. And, of course, at least one song had to bring in some blasting. I also wanted to create a track where a heavy wall of guitars would unapologetically collide with a almost ridiculously pompous symphonic melody, leaving the listener with that “what the hell just happened?” feeling.

The lyrics of the song aren’t my own but are by the poet and composer P. J. Hannikainen (1854–1924). In the late 1800s, he composed and wrote lyrics for many well known songs and the lyrics of Kajahtaa are from Karjalaisten laulu (The Song of the Karelians), which is the regional song for the Karelian people and the current Finnish regions of South and North Karelia.

I had actually written my own lyrics for the track, almost finished, but I wasn’t fully satisfied with them yet. I started looking through Karelian-themed songs as background material, wanting to retain that same lyrical quality found in old songs about Karelia. And one night, I was reading the lyrics of 'Karjalaisten laulu' while listening to the already finnished song on loop, and I realized that the words fit perfectly. They conveyed the song's message more beautifully and completely than I ever could. By the next morning, my previous lyrics were tucked back in the drawer, and I finalized the track with the words from Karjalaisten laulu. I’m very pleased with this choice, as my own lyrics were on a slightly different theme that might have brought an angle to the album it didn’t really need.

Piilopirtti tells a story of survival on the Karelian Isthmus during the 17th century, when enemy troops periodically attacked villages, leaving destruction in their wake.

The earliest written record of the name I bear as my surname comes from a rural tax register on the Karelian Isthmus in the early 1500s. It details land ownership and family tax obligations. By the 1600s, tax records show a significant decline in the population on the estate, which aligns with the stories that tell of local inhabitants fleeing to hideouts or perishing during enemy raids.

One such story recounts how an ancestor of mine saw smoke rising from a neighboring village and quickly removed the steps leading across the river to his farm. The enemy, aware of a house across the river, tried to reach it but were thwarted by the steep banks. Reportedly, they told a captured guide, “One old man doesn’t matter; let him live.” And because of that, 400 years later, I exist to write a song about it.

Kaikki Kaunis Katoaa serves as the intro to the album's closing track. The song contains brief lyrics extracted from the track Kuollut Maa, which roughly translates: “All that is beautiful fades anyway, so why burn it?”

I envisioned a desolate scene of ashen ruins from burned villages and the devastation sown by cynical destructive forces. This destruction sweeps away the lives, cultures, and songs of past centuries, leaving them to be carried off by wind and fire. In the end, it makes no difference who sets the homes ablaze—the fleeing inhabitants or the attackers; all that is beautiful is lost forever.

For this song, I wanted to capture the hopelessness of that moment when everything beautiful is already burning and irreversibly destroyed. The only thing left to do is to warm yourself by the embers of the ruins and watch as everything you loved is devastated before your eyes.

Kuollut Maa is the first of two singles released from the album, having been released in June 2024.

It was the first song I composed after The Antimatter single. When the composition phase was over, I still wasn’t sure whether I’d release it as a standalone single, like the previous one, or as part of a larger whole.

The composition process was once again easy, although it was still a time- and energy-consuming endeavor. Looking back, I’d estimate that I was in a state of pure flow for about 90% of the composing phase. Oh, how I wish it were possible to access that state in all aspects of life—a pure creative space where experimentation and an open, curious, playful mind works to produce a result that, in my opinion, is greater than the sum of its parts.

The lyrics, too, seemed to come to me as they would already exist: I wrote them in half an hour without making any corrections, feeling as if I was simply plucking words out of the air. What’s more, I had no intention of writing a song in Finnish. But what can you do when associative processes in your head work the way they do?

And since the song ended up with Finnish lyrics—and deeply personal ones at that—I decided that this was a theme I had more to say about than just a single track. At that point, it became clear that I had to forge at least an EP’s worth of Finnish-language metal.

If you don’t understand why there’s a chicken on the cover of the Karelia Suite album, I can’t blame you. You likely wouldn’t understand, because the image itself doesn’t carry any universal significance—it’s deeply personal. Still, in my view, it ties together the album's themes better than anything else.

One small chicken. Made of clay, painted, and just small enough to fit in the grasp of a little girl’s hand. That chicken is a decoration, or a toy, or perhaps both. It’s the only thing that my wife’s grandmother, a little girl at the time, could take with her when her family received the evacuation order from their farm in eastern Karelia—roughly in that corner of the world where a certain child-murdering dictator now spends his quality time at one of his many dachas.

You see, this theme is personal to me as a grandchild of Karelian evacuees, but it’s also deeply familiar to so many others that, in a relationship formed entirely by chance on the other side of Finland, both partners can carry similar intergenerational traumas.

Today, that little chicken stands on our kitchen shelf as a reminder of how everything can change in an instant, for reasons outside one’s control, and of how, out of all the possessions around us, the only thing that may remain in hand could be just a tiny piece of clay. 

The cover art does not involve AI. It is based on a photo I took and then edited. The broken painting is, in fact, my son's art project, which he broke because he wasn’t satisfied with it. As I looked at the destroyed painting on my kitchen table, I saw something in it that had been on my mind a lot during the album-making process: shattered dreams and memories that people of my grandparents’ generation had to live with for the rest of their lives after losing their beloved homelands. 

Nearby, in my kitchen, was the clay chicken, which I mentioned earlier. Somehow, I ended up placing the chicken in the middle of the broken painting. The symbolism felt so strong to me that I took a photo of it and decided to use it as the cover for the Karelia Suite album. Perhaps I also wanted to show my son that art is sometimes random and evolves into outcomes we might not have initially intended.

The rooster visible in this image is a weather vane that once stood on the roof of the village church located on the lands my ancestors lost. What do the chicken and rooster in the image have in common with the Karelians and Finns in general? They always look west. Always.