SONATA ARCTICA Trivia — 133 Entries
133 sourced facts about SONATA ARCTICA.
Trivia
Silence sold heavily not only in Finland but in Japan, where the band's own history puts it at more than 30,000 copies within the first year. Those sales are the reason they played their first four Japanese concerts in September 2001. Their first visit to Japan was pulled there by Japanese record buyers.
The band's first live album, Songs of Silence, was recorded at their Tokyo show on 4 September 2001 and released in November 2002. The European and Asian editions carry completely different cover art, both by Janne "ToxicAngel" Pitkänen, who went on to become the exclusive artist for every Sonata Arctica release.
Two more releases followed in late 2003. The Broken single carried two previously unreleased bonus tracks recorded while Mikko Härkin was still in the band. The other, the Takatalvi EP, went to Japan, collecting songs from the by-then sold-out Successor EP plus extra material, minus the live tracks.
Sonata Arctica's first DVD was shot in Japan. The venue was Shibuya-AX in Tokyo, and for the filming the band played two shows back to back with identical setlists.
According to their Japanese label Marquee Avalon, Sonata Arctica made their Japanese debut in 2000 with their first album, Ecliptica. The label writes that they won substantial support from Japanese fans almost immediately, and that their standing was established by their first Japanese visit, made with the follow-up album Silence.
On its own pages Marquee Avalon describes Sonata Arctica as having reigned as the label's flagship artist. For this Japanese hard rock and metal specialist, they were the marquee name.
Some of the albums carry Japanese subtitles. Unia, Finnish for dreams, was issued in Japan as ウニア～夢記（ゆめのしるし）, and Talviyö, Finnish for winter night, as タルヴィユエ～冴ゆる宵闇. Rather than translate the titles outright, the Japanese editions transliterate them and add a subtitle alongside.
Japanese editions almost always carried extra tracks. Working through Marquee Avalon's release pages, Reckoning Night, Stones Grow Her Name, Pariah's Child, Ecliptica - Revisited, The Ninth Hour and Talviyö each added one bonus track, The Days of Grays added two, and Unia added three.
Stones Grow Her Name also appeared in Japan as a tour edition, released on 24 October 2012. The main album came on SHM-CD, with a second disc adding acoustic versions of Only The Broken Hearts (Make You Beautiful), I Have A Right, Alone In Heaven and Somewhere Close To You. Its catalogue number was MICP 20003.
The Japanese limited edition of The Days of Grays was a two-disc set whose second disc carried six live recordings under the title Official Bootleg Live Around Europe 2008: Paid In Full, Black Sheep, Draw Me, It Won't Fade, Replica and Don't Say A Word.
The Japanese edition of Clear Cold Beyond came out on 8 March 2024 as MICP-11850 at ¥3,000 including tax, with the two bonus tracks added. Abroad those two songs were confined to the digipak and vinyl; in Japan they were on the CD.
The idea of re-recording the entire debut came first from the band's Japanese label. Henrik Klingenberg said it felt a bit weird at first but that the idea grew on them: since only Tony and Tommy had played on the original, they thought it would be fun to give the songs another run with the current line-up.
Before they were Sonata Arctica they were Tricky Beans, a band from the northern Finnish town of Kemi. Three demos went out under that name: Friends Till the End, Agre Pamppers and PeaceMaker. The earliest recordings by what became a byword for Nordic power metal were released under a name nobody would recognise today.
In 1997 the band renamed itself Tricky Means, and the change was not only cosmetic: their own site records that this was when they moved from rock towards power metal, taking their cues from bands such as Stratovarius. The name Sonata Arctica was still two steps away.
The demo they cut as Tricky Means at Tico Tico Studios in Kemi, FullMoon, caught the ear of the studio's owner Ahti Kortelainen. He passed it to Finland's Spinefarm Records, which led to their first album deal in 1999 — and only then did the band decide they needed a name that suited the music, settling on Sonata Arctica. The record deal came before the name did.
The debut single UnOpened appeared in the summer of 1999 carrying the title track and Mary Lou. The first pressing had accidentally been slowed down, and the mistake was only noticed after the records had already shipped to stores. The label recalled the single and issued a corrected version.
In 2000 the band was picked as support for Stratovarius on their European tour with Rhapsody. Their own history records that they were chosen out of thirty-two bands put forward by fifteen different record companies. It was the first time they had played outside Finland.
In the early days Tony Kakko sang and played keyboards at the same time. Wanting to concentrate on singing on stage, he brought in Mikko Härkin as a dedicated keyboard player in 2000. For a while the two of them would play the same keyboard simultaneously, which the band's history remembers as an unusual sight in their live show.
Rather than let the momentum drop, the band went straight back into the studio for their second album, Silence, with Tony Kakko writing every song on it. The first single, Wolf & Raven, was filmed in Finland and gave them their first music video.
When Mikko Härkin left in the summer of 2002, applications for the keyboard seat came in from all over the world. Two finalists were flown to Kemi, but rather than judge them on playing alone the band took each of them to a local bar to see how they got on. The one who fitted was Henrik Klingenberg, from Kokkola.
The band had already begun work on their third album, Winterheart's Guild, while they were still looking for a keyboard player. Stratovarius's Jens Johansson stepped in to play solos on four songs, and Tony Kakko handled the rest of the keyboards himself.
Victoria's Secret, the first single from Winterheart's Guild, raced to number two on the Finnish chart and took the top spot two weeks later. The band's own history calls it the highest-ranked Sonata Arctica single to that date.
Winterheart's Guild was their last album for Spinefarm Records. The band shopped around and signed a multi-record deal with the German label Nuclear Blast — a deal that, according to their own history, is why they were chosen to open Iron Maiden's Japanese shows in 2004.
The fourth album, Reckoning Night, was cut at Tico Tico Studios from March 2004. It was Henrik Klingenberg's first record with the band, playing hammond and keyboards, and the first time both his and Tony Kakko's keyboard tracks were used together — which the band credits for the density of the album's sound.
Don't Say A Word entered the Finnish chart at number one, the fastest a Sonata Arctica single had done so. The EP of the same name climbed to number four, putting two of their releases inside the top ten at once.
In October 2004 the second album, Silence, was certified gold in Finland for 15,000 copies — the first Sonata Arctica album to reach that mark, and, as their own history puts it, the first of many. The moment was celebrated in front of an audience at the Helsinki club Tavastia.
Reckoning Night went on to sell 100,000 copies worldwide and is described on the band's own site as the most successful Sonata Arctica album. The gold certification reached them in February 2006 while they were still touring North America.
The Reckoning Night World Tour, which had run for more than two years, ended in August 2006 with the first ever Sonata Arctica Open Air festival in their home town of Kemi — the band putting their own name on a festival where they grew up. The tour totalled 167 shows in seventeen countries.
The making of the fifth album, Unia, was filmed for a Finnish documentary called Songs From The North Or Something. It went no further than the annual music video festival in Oulu and Helsinki in September 2007, where it was screened and left.
Around this time the band was approached about a PC role-playing game based on their album Winterheart's Guild. According to their own history the project never got beyond the concept stage.
According to the band's Japanese label Marquee Avalon, the first Sonata Arctica album to top the Finnish album chart was Unia in 2007. It arrived after the live release For The Sake Of Revenge and their first best-of, The End Of This Chapter.
On 6 August 2007 the band published a statement making Jani Liimatainen's departure public. In it they said his failure to deal with his compulsory military and civil service obligations had opened a rift they could not close, leaving them no option but to ask him to go. The statement adds that he had been told in May, that the separation was amicable, and that the announcement had been held back to give him time to put his life in order.
The second half of the same statement announced that Elias Viljanen was, from that day, a full and official member. The band wrote that over the summer he had repeatedly shown he could fill the boots Jani had left behind, noted the long Unia tour ahead of them, and closed with the line that Sonata Arctica was whole again.
Elias Viljanen was a solo artist, brought in as a stand-in for the Unia Finnish tour and the Japanese dates. He filled the role so seamlessly that he was asked to join permanently in July 2007 — meaning he had already played Japan as a substitute before he was a member.
2008 was the busiest touring year in the band's history. At Wacken Open Air they played to more than eighty thousand people. The US tour with Nightwish the same year was hit by cancellations through illness, which left Sonata Arctica playing free shows for the people who had turned up anyway. It was also the year of their first appearance in Russia.
The sixth album, The Days of Grays, was certified gold on the day of its release — the first Sonata Arctica album to manage that. It was also the first studio record with Elias Viljanen on guitar.
In 2010 the band played Australia for the first time, then China and Taiwan, before heading back to Japan. The Days of Grays World Tour ran from 9 July 2009 to 15 August 2011 across 182 shows in thirty-eight countries, and brought first visits to Australia, China, Taiwan, Guatemala, Ecuador, Venezuela, El Salvador and Uruguay.
The DVD shoot planned for Milan on 30 September 2010 was postponed after Elias Viljanen broke his hand while working out earlier that month. The rescheduled filming slipped into 2011 and the location moved to Oulu, in Finland.
Once the filming had moved to Oulu, the band played a special two-hour show in Milan as a thank-you to the fans who had bought tickets for the cancelled DVD shoot the year before, debuting the new DVD's setlist there. The finished Live in Finland was released on 11 November — making the release date 11/11/2011.
In January 2011 the band sailed on the inaugural 70,000 Tons of Metal cruise, which ran from Miami to Mexico with three straight days of shows around the clock. Sonata Arctica played twice, with alternating setlists.
When the band went into the studio in September 2011 for their seventh album, the stated focus was making the songs easier to translate on stage. What came out was Stones Grow Her Name.
Released in May 2012, Stones Grow Her Name became the first Sonata Arctica album certified gold on pre-sales alone. It was also the first time they cracked a US chart, landing at number nine on Billboard's Heatseekers.
On 26 August 2013 the band announced the departure of Marko Paasikoski, their bass player of a decade. In his own words in that statement, life in a touring band was no longer an option for him and he no longer had the motivation or the passion the job required, so parting was better for everyone. The band noted that he had seen the Stones Grow Her Name World Tour through to the end.
His replacement, Pasi Kauppinen, was already deep inside the band's sound before he joined. The official statement notes that he had mixed both of their DVDs and recorded parts of their previous three studio albums. He is a member of Silent Voices and formerly of Requiem and Winterborn.
With the mastering finished in early January 2014, the band launched a special tour marking fifteen years as a recording artist — twenty-five shows across Finland and Latin America, with a set drawn from their whole career and running to nearly two hours, longer than usual.
In the spring of 2015 the band ran an exclusive Ecliptica over Europe tour, playing the debut album from beginning to end across thirteen shows in eight countries. The Pariah's Child World Tour then closed in Tampere on 22 August 2015 with the last complete performance of Ecliptica — a two-and-a-half-hour night that also took in acoustic songs and a regular set, with The Preacher appearing as a special guest.
In December 2014 the book about the band was published in English as an e-book. Built from the accounts of the band and the people around them, it carries a complete discography, previously unreleased photographs spanning their career, and a short story titled The Key written by Tony Kakko. The band's site was explicit that the English edition would exist only as an e-book, with no printed version.
Just as the band was preparing to record their ninth album, an opportunity came to support their fellow Finns Nightwish on a North American tour in the spring of 2016. They took the tour and pushed the album back.
Partway through The Ninth Hour world tour the band staged a special run of Finnish shows called The Winter Chapter Tour, playing the entire Caleb saga in chronological order along with both parts of the White Pearl, Black Oceans compositions.
The all-acoustic shows began as a way to do something different during a summer with no new album out. The band had played the odd song acoustically over the years and the response had been enthusiastic, so they turned part of the festival season over to complete acoustic sets. Their friend Masi Hukari, formerly of Amoral, joined them on guitar for those shows.
For their tenth album the band brought in Mikko Tegelman as producer — the man who had been their front of house engineer for many years. They went back into Studio57 in the autumn of 2018 and spent the season working on the record.
In October 2021 the band announced a fifteen-date acoustic tour of Finland for February and March 2022. In the announcement they said they had come a long way with the Acoustic Adventures project and that it was now time to put out a couple of records from it, the first due in early 2022 — adding that they would be playing places they had not visited in ages, with a set taking in new material as well as the hits.
Acoustic Adventures – Volume Two was released on 30 September 2022 through Atomic Fire. Like the first volume it was recorded and produced by Mikko Tegelman with the band at Studio57 in Finland, with cover artwork by Janne Pitkänen.
In December 2020 the band announced a twelve-date Finnish tour for the following year to mark their twenty-fifth anniversary, opening at Lutakko in Jyväskylä on 18 February 2021 and closing at the Kulttuurikeskus in Espoo on 26 March. They said it felt amazing to be in a band that had been around for a quarter of a century, that after all kinds of adventures they were still there, and that the shows would draw on their entire career.
First In Line, released digitally on 13 October 2023, was the first taste of an album returning to electric soundscapes. Tony Kakko said it was the first power metal song he wrote for the record and that its demo title stuck. The subject is anxiety about raising a new generation — the worry that television, tablets and similar screens are doing a large part of the bringing-up, whether such devices are the right nanny for a child, and whether people should slow down, read books, and teach that happiness often comes from stopping rather than from constant audiovisual stimulation.
The eleventh album, Clear Cold Beyond, was released on 8 March 2024 through Atomic Fire. Its artwork, deliberately reminiscent of the band's early records, was created by Niko Anttila, and mixing engineer Mikko Karmila of Finnvox Studios returned — the official announcement putting his run with the band as Ecliptica in 1999 through Stones Grow Her Name in 2012. Final mastering went to Svante Forsbäck of Chartmakers West, who had also worked on earlier Sonata Arctica productions.
Explaining why Clear Cold Beyond leans fast, Tony Kakko said the band had felt for a while that they needed to get heavier after a couple of unintentionally softer albums. He was careful to say they still love those records, but that the previous one had not offered many cornerstone songs for a feel-good melodic metal show. Getting back to metal felt like a fresh start, and the new songs had been fun to write and record.
The original Ecliptica was recorded at Tico-Tico studios and mixed at Finnvox by Mikko Karmila, an engineer also known for his work with Nightwish and Children Of Bodom. That choice would come back around twenty-five years later on Clear Cold Beyond.
In a 2019 interview Tony Kakko described power metal as one phase for the band rather than its definition. Even on Ecliptica, he said, a great many songs are not power metal at all, and he named FullMoon and Replica as examples. The label the outside world attached to them never quite matched how he saw the band himself.
Kakko traced the style back to falling for Stratovarius's Visions in 1997. The band started by covering them, then began writing their own songs in the same vein — and then, unexpectedly, a record contract arrived. Had the deal come five years later, he reckoned, the music might have gone somewhere else entirely.
In 2024 Kakko explained why the early songs are played live in lower keys. When the debut was recorded he had almost no experience of singing heavy metal on stage and had not yet found his own voice, so he modelled himself on Stratovarius singer Timo Kotipelto and sang loud and high. That register, he says, was never really his; he considers his voice to work best in the mid-range.
In 2003 Victoria's Secret went past Eminem on the Finnish singles chart to reach number one. Blabbermouth listed it among the band's eye-raising achievements, alongside being voted Best Newcomer by the Finnish Recording Industry Association in 2001.
Reckoning Night was certified gold in Finland in February 2006. The Finnish threshold is 15,000 copies, a mark the band had already reached with their third album, Winterheart's Guild.
In a 2024 interview Tony Kakko said the Reckoning Night tour ran to somewhere close to 180 or 200 shows and left everybody a little burnt out. It had been studio, road, studio again at high speed, and looking back he felt they should have taken a break. The sharp change of direction on the next album came immediately after that exhaustion.
Unia is Finnish for dreams. The album was mixed at Finnvox studio in Helsinki and mastered at the Cutting Room in Stockholm, Sweden.
Unia was certified gold in Finland in May 2007 and, as of 2009, was approaching platinum status there, which in Finland means 30,000 copies.
In 2007 Tony Kakko took part in Northern Kings, a quartet of Finnish metal singers alongside J. Ahola of Teräsbetoni, Marco Hietala of Tarot and Nightwish, and J-P Leppäluoto of Charon. Their covers album, released on 24 October that year, put metal arrangements on eighties hits by the likes of Tina Turner, Cutting Crew, Phil Collins, Dire Straits, Peter Gabriel and David Bowie.
Choosing a title for the eighth album, Tony Kakko first worked through the symbolism of the number eight and of infinity, then threw it all out as too well-worn. What he arrived at instead was the realisation that the band had somewhere along the way abandoned their totem animal, the wolf. With the music leaning back towards the older style and wolves returning in one form or another across several songs, a wolf on the cover became obvious: an abandoned wolf, a pariah — or a pariah's child, the new generation that brings the old logo back.
In its first week Pariah's Child charted at number one in Finland, thirteen in Switzerland, sixteen in the Czech Republic, thirty in Austria, thirty-one in Germany, fifty-two in the Netherlands, seventy-eight in Spain and 127 in the UK. Henrik Klingenberg said that getting an album to number one somehow never gets old.
Klingenberg was explicit that the re-recording was not an attempt to rewrite history. The original Ecliptica, he said, is the band's starting point and carries a certain innocence and enthusiasm that cannot be recreated now that they are no longer teenagers. The new version was framed instead as a tribute and an update on how the songs sound played by the current line-up, staying as true to the original as possible rather than turning into a re-arranged project where you could not tell which song was which.
The 2015 Christmas single Christmas Spirits was a song that had already been around for about ten years. There had never been time to record it; the basic tracks were finally laid down during the Pariah's Child sessions and the song was finished that autumn. The band put the delay down to the lyrics, saying it is nearly impossible to get into a Christmas mood unless it actually is Christmas — and tipped their hats to Tony Kakko for writing them anyway, in autumn, without any snow.
Tony Kakko described the artwork of The Ninth Hour as a future utopian landscape in the background, nature and human technology in balance. In the middle sits an hourglass contraption with a knob: the right-hand cup stands for nature with no humans left, the left for human dystopia after nature has been destroyed. His idea was that turning the knob tilts the glass one way or the other, slowly emptying one cup and erasing that future.
Speaking about Life, Tony Kakko said he tries to include at least one positive, uplifting song on every Sonata Arctica album — while admitting he always struggles to write positive lyrics. The band has been called happy metal many times because of the melodies, he noted, but the words usually do not walk the sunny side of the road; they contrast with the music.
The cover of Talviyö is a photograph. Henrik Klingenberg said the band had been talking about making an album cover from a photo and were lucky enough to find the award-winning photographer Onni Wiljami, who comes from a village not far from their home town and whose pictures were, in his words, just perfect for this album.
Tony Kakko named three reasons for the return to the old style. First, the previous album Talviyö had turned out much softer than intended, and at the time not one song from it remained in the live set. Second, the two acoustic albums and a ten-week tour behind them had got that impulse out of their system and left them ready for something entirely different. Third, playing early power metal songs at the 25th anniversary shows and seeing how the crowds responded gave them a great deal of energy.
California grew out of a single line about California falling into the sea — but Tony Kakko was clear that it is not about climate or geology. He had read that it is physically impossible for the land to slide into the ocean the way it does in films, because the continental plates move the wrong way, and he used the phrase in the same sense as when cows fly. The song is about a relationship: telling someone who is using you, pretending to love you while angling for something else, that you have noticed.
As part of the Stones Grow Her Name cycle the band played three Japanese dates in February 2013: Tokyo's O East on the 6th, Osaka's Big Cat on the 7th and Nagoya's Club Quattro on the 8th.
The live release For The Sake Of Revenge was given a Japanese subtitle naming the tour it came from: レコニング・ナイト・ジャパン・ツアー2005, the Reckoning Night Japan Tour 2005. It came out in Japan on 24 March 2006 in a limited DVD-plus-CD edition and a standard CD edition.
A Japanese compilation, The Harvests (2007-2017), was released as a two-disc set on 25 July 2018. Its bonus disc gathers single edits and stray tracks alongside a cover of Bryan Adams's Run To You and Christmas Spirits.
Both halves of the acoustic pair were issued in Japan in card sleeves. Acoustic Adventures Volume One appeared on 19 January 2022 as MICP-11630, and Volume Two on 28 September that year as MICP-11720.
The Japanese notes for Acoustic Adventures – Volume Two describe the second volume as built mainly around the band's popular early songs. The credits show Elias Viljanen playing banjo as well as guitar, and Tommy Portimo on drums and percussion.
By the time of the FullMoon demo the template was already set — fast, melodic, keyboard-heavy metal with clean high vocals. The band's own history describes that tape as the point where their trademark sound was codified, before they had a name or a label.
The band's Japanese label Marquee Avalon dates the formation to 1995 and names the core as Marko Paasikoski on guitar, Jani Liimatainen on guitar and Tommy Portimo on drums, with Tony Kakko on vocals and Pentti Peura on bass joining shortly afterwards. The band's own website, however, gives 1996, so the founding year is not settled between the two sources.
The success of Ecliptica opened doors that a debut album does not usually open. It led to the band being invited onto tribute records for established names such as the Scorpions and Helloween.
The Ecliptica Tour ran from 8 August 1999 to 30 June 2000 — sixty shows across fourteen countries. That was the scale of the band's first year on the road, before anybody outside Finland knew who they were.
In the summer of 2000 bassist Janne Kivilahti left for personal reasons. His replacement was a returning founder member, Marko Paasikoski — who had originally been a guitarist and came back playing bass instead.
After the Stratovarius tour the band put out a mini CD/EP called Successor to bridge the gap to the next album, collecting unreleased tracks, covers and live recordings.
The short South American run in early 2002 was four shows in Brazil and two in Chile. The crowds were loud enough that, by the band's own account, on some nights the audience drowned out the instruments and the band could not hear themselves on stage.
Ecliptica was nominated for an Emma Award — the Finnish equivalent of a Grammy — in the best hard rock/heavy album category. Word reached the band while they were in the middle of a European tour with Gamma Ray.
The Silence Tour ran from 26 January 2001 to 27 July 2002: seventy-seven shows in fifteen countries. Within that stretch the band played Japan for the first time, recorded their first live album there, and went to South America for the first time.
Henrik Klingenberg had spent close to a decade in local progressive metal bands such as Requiem and Silent Voices before joining. Unlike his predecessor, who preferred to stay in one place, he roamed the stage with a keyboard controller — and the band's history dates the rise in their live energy from around that point.
Henrik Klingenberg's first appearance with Sonata Arctica was in Tornio on 21 February 2003. After a short Finnish run to find his feet, the band took him to Japan to show off their new keyboard player.
The Winterheart's Guild album itself peaked at number three in Finland and stayed five weeks inside the top ten. That year's festival season opened at Sweden Rock Festival and ran through Nummirock and Hungary's Sziget Festival before closing with their second appearance at Wacken Open Air.
The Winterheart's Guild Tour ran only from 21 February to 31 August 2003 — forty-six shows in six countries, which the band's own history flags as their shortest tour up to that point.
Rather than headline behind Reckoning Night, the band accepted an invitation to open for Nightwish in Europe. Some nights drew crowds in excess of twelve thousand, and their own history reckons it exposed them to far more people than a headline run of their own would have.
In October 2005 the band opened for Nightwish at the Hartwall Arena in Helsinki — the night Nightwish filmed their End of An Era DVD. Sonata Arctica picked up their second Finnish gold disc, for Winterheart's Guild, later that December.
The North American tour in early 2006 covered twenty-nine shows across twenty-eight different venues. It was the band making good on a promise: after a short east-coast run in 2004 they had said they would come back for something longer.
Touring Unia took the band to Mexico for the first time, through a twenty-day US run, and to a debut appearance at the Atlanta-based ProgPower festival in September. In Europe they toured with Epica and Ride the Sky opening.
The Unia World Tour ran from 27 April 2007 to 29 November 2008 — 157 shows in twenty-six countries. It was Elias Viljanen's first tour with the band, and it took them to Russia, Mexico, Argentina and Peru for the first time.
On the Days of Grays cycle, Dragonforce opened the second leg of the band's US and Canadian dates. Going to North America before Europe to promote a new album was, by their own account, one of the few times they did it in that order. In Europe, Delain and Winterborn opened.
The Live in Finland DVD reached number one on the official Finnish charts.
Live in Finland also entered the official German DVD chart at number seven.
Battle Beast opened the European leg in 2012. Both that tour and a short North American run in December were filmed by Tony Kakko himself, with videos posted to the band's YouTube channel as they went, so fans could follow life on the road.
In April 2015 Tony Kakko appeared in Karmaflow: The Rock Opera Videogame, a crossover between music, gaming and theatre featuring several singers in character roles. A keen gamer, he called it a long and enjoyable project — but deliberately declined to say which role he had played, telling people to find out for themselves.
The Ninth Hour was nominated for Best Metal Album at Finland's Emma-gaala, the country's equivalent of the Grammy Awards.
The Ninth Hour World Tour ran from 7 October 2016 to 26 August 2018 — 162 shows in twenty-nine countries — and brought first visits to Honduras, Israel and Belarus.
Ahead of the album's release the band performed the first single, A Little Less Understanding, at summer festivals as a teaser for what was coming. Talviyö was released on 6 September 2019.
The second single from Acoustic Adventures – Volume Two was Victoria's Secret, originally released in 2003 on Winterheart's Guild. A song that had once topped the Finnish chart was issued as a single for a second time, nineteen years later, in acoustic form.
In November 2020 drummer Tommy Portimo designed jewellery for the Signature Artist series run by Gem Sessions, at the company's invitation. The pieces were sold as pendants through their shop.
Clear Cold Beyond runs to ten tracks, with two bonus songs added only to the digipak and vinyl editions: A Ballad For The Broken and a cover of Martika's Toy Soldiers.
The discography on the band's own website lists singles alongside albums and EPs. The oldest entry is the 1999 debut single UnOpened, and the page runs unbroken from there through studio albums, live releases, compilations, DVDs and singles up to Clear Cold Beyond.
The disagreement over the founding year is not simply a case of outside sources getting it wrong. In a 2024 interview Tony Kakko himself put it as the band having started in '95 or '96, so the year is unfixed even in the memory of the man who was there. Their 25th anniversary shows were staged in 2021.
A September 2007 interview gives a glimpse of what that game project involved. Tony Kakko said the band's part was meant to be recording voice-over work, but that they had not heard from the developer in a while, and he was careful to note that the studio behind it was not a large one.
Paid in Full, the single that trailed Unia, entered the Finnish chart at number one.
In December 2007 it was reported that Tony Kakko had guested on Deathanity by Odin's Court, a progressive rock and metal band from Lexington Park, Maryland, adding lead vocals to a song called Crownet. Odin's Court were at the time an independent band without a label.
The Days of Grays entered the official Finnish chart at number two and was certified gold on release day for sales past 15,000 copies. In North America it came out on 22 September 2009 through Nuclear Blast.
In its first week Stones Grow Her Name charted at number one in Finland, thirteen in Hungary, twenty-one in Switzerland, twenty-four in Germany and twenty-nine in Austria. In the United States it sold around 2,100 copies that week and reached number nine on the Heatseekers chart. It was certified gold in Finland for sales past 10,000 copies.
Stones Grow Her Name was recorded in several studios around Finland, mixed at Sonic Pump Studios by Mikko Karmila and mastered at Chartmakers by Svante Forsbäck. Nuclear Blast released it in Europe on 18 May 2012 and in North America on the 22nd.
Of the lead single The Wolves Die Young, Tony Kakko said it was pretty much born to be a single and that it paved the road for the rest of the album, setting its mood. The wolf, once again, is a metaphor — for fear and how a person processes it, or rather denies that they fear anything at all.
The music video for The Wolves Die Young was filmed in January 2014 at Sibelius House in Lahti, Finland, and produced by Patric Ullaeus of Revolver Film Company, whose credits include Lacuna Coil and In Flames.
Cloud Factory, issued ahead of the Pariah's Child album, was described by Tony Kakko as having an earworm factor, which he noted is not a bad thing in a single. The lyric follows a father who already sees his young son going to work in the same factory he still goes to, where his own father and grandfather went before him, and the pleasantly vicious circle that never ends.
The short ballad Love is about two people who meet young and stay together for life. Tony Kakko explained that he had often been asked why every Sonata Arctica love song is cruel and sad with something always going wrong, and that this one was his attempt to navigate the uncharted waters of happiness — the lifelong love of the old couples you see walking hand in hand, which he called beautiful and rare.
The re-recording was done by dropping into the studio between dates on the Pariah's Child world tour. Ecliptica - Revisited; 15th Anniversary Edition came out on 24 October 2014 through Nuclear Blast, with the digital single Kingdom For A Heart released on 12 September. A cover of Genesis's I Can't Dance was included as a bonus track.
Christmas Spirits was released on 18 December 2015 — six days before Christmas — through Nuclear Blast, as a digital download and as a limited-edition EP sold only through the Nuclear Blast web shop. It carried three versions: the original, a radio edit and an orchestral version.
Serious work on The Ninth Hour began in mid-April 2016 across several home studios around Finland, with the main recording and mixing done at Studio57 in Alaveteli. Tony Kakko described that room as a centre point where all the work finally ended up.
Closer To An Animal, the lead single and opening track of The Ninth Hour, arrived at the studio partway through the sessions when Tony Kakko sent it over with the words that it would be the album opener. According to Henrik Klingenberg, everyone who heard the demo simply had to agree. He called it a metal-meets-eighties kind of song and said they chose it as the first single because it gives a fairly clear picture of what the album holds.
Kakko described the words of Life as telling people to find the good things in life, find what is hurting and causing harm, and replace it with something positive with the help of friends — to go out, be together with people, share experiences, live. He acknowledged it was a daft thing to say, then said it anyway: life is better alive.
Talviyö is Finnish for winter night. It was recorded between September 2018 and May 2019 at Studio57, produced by Mikko Tegelman with the band, mixed by Tegelman and Pasi Kauppinen, and mastered by Svante Forsbäck for Chartmakers.
Of the lead single A Little Less Understanding, Tony Kakko said it is lyrically something of a follow-up to I Have A Right, dealing with the difficulty of making the right choices in bringing up a new human being. The aim for the record, he added, had been an album musically in line with at least the previous two.
The first song written and recorded for the Clear Cold Beyond sessions is not on the album. Tony Kakko was unhappy with its lyrics and some of the arrangement and left it off, saying he would fix it and put it on the next record. The fast power metal song that broke the ice for the whole return, in other words, is not one you can hear on this album.
Looking back in 2024, Tony Kakko said the change of direction on Unia was entirely his own decision and that the rest of the band did not understand what he was doing. He had considered it a catharsis and a matter of artistic freedom, while conceding it was probably not a smart business move. His advice, drawn from it, was that when your livelihood depends on what you do you should not play around with it too much — and that such ambitions are better directed at a solo project.
Asked what he had learned from making Unia, Tony Kakko laughed that he likes to make things complicated, then said he had been trying to do everything himself on that record. It was the first album on which he used orchestration in the songs, and he does not think it was executed properly. The lesson, he said, was that he does not have to do it all: he can work with people who are very good at what they do and concentrate on what he knows he can do.
Blabbermouth described Clear Cold Beyond as ten tracks reviving the band's penchant for power metal after their trip into acoustic landscapes during the pandemic — a record fusing elements from every period of their work, from the high-speed First In Line and California to the emotion-laden The Best Things and the closing title track.