Battle Beast

This is the second album by the band formed in Helsinki in 2008, and the one they named after themselves. Nuclear Blast released it on 17 May 2013 and it reached number five on the Finnish album chart. The great change here is the singer. Nitte Valo, who had sung on Steel in 2011, left in the autumn of 2012 and Noora Louhimo took her place. What is on the record is a voice with an unusual range, from a rough low push to a full scream, set against the 1980s forms the band already worked in. Guitarist Anton Kabanen takes a co-lead vocal on the first track "Let It Roar", the fifth "Raven" and the thirteenth "Rain Man". Kabanen produced. Janne Bjorkroth wrote the orchestration and co-produced, Lucas Lonnross also engineered, and Mika Jussila mastered it at Finnvox Studios in Helsinki. As on the first album, several songs are drawn from Kentaro Miura's manga Berserk -- "Out of Control", "Golden Age", "Kingdom" and "Fight, Kill, Die" -- while "Neuromancer" is about the William Gibson novel of that name.