Love Metal

After nearly breaking up on the exhausting tour behind Deep Shadows and Brilliant Highlights, the band took two months off at the start of 2002. While the others flew away on holiday, the singer Ville Valo stayed in Helsinki and began writing. When they regrouped at the turn of February and March they felt re-energised and were excited by what he had written. They started demoing that spring with Hiili Hiilesmaa, who had produced their 1997 debut, worked on the material for about six months and entered Finnvox Studios in September 2002. The sound is rawer and more organic than the last record, drawn from the band's early influences and read by some as a reaction to how hard that album had been to make. Valo has since described this as the album on which HIM found their sound. It is also the first of their records to put the Heartagram, the band's logo, on the front. The title was a phrase coined in the mid-nineties to describe their own genre. The album charted in eleven countries, reaching number one in Finland and Germany, where it went platinum and gold respectively, and it was their first to chart in the United Kingdom and France, at 55 and 141. Of the three singles, "The Funeral of Hearts" went to number one in Finland; the professional skateboarder and Jackass member Bam Margera directed two of the videos. The running order here is the original's as printed.