Track By Tracks: Dyecrest - Once I Had A Heart (2023)

Album as a whole:

Niko: I think overall this is by far the Dyecrest’s tightest (and the best!) album and it is a killer package. Versatile songs but still an intense and compact entirety. I believe that the album is a very good mix of traditional melodic metal and more modern stuff.

“Once I Had a Heart” has nine tracks, which contain a variable set of melodic metal. You can truly hear that this time it is for real, and the album is filled with killer tracks! The album on the whole is a tighter package than any previous Dyecrest album, and it lifts the band to a whole new level, for sure! On the album, there are some songs which have been written already some years ago (for example “Read My Mind” and “Man Made God”) as well as brand new songs, such as the title track “Once I Had a Heart”, the crushing opener “Sacred Sleep”, the bouncing and heavy “Oathkeeper” and the majestic and powerful half-ballad “Fire From Your World”, which also ends the album with it’s the heartbreaking atmosphere.

Each song track by track:

1. Sacred Sleep:

This is one of the heaviest tracks we have written. Was chosen to be the album opener for it really is “a punch in the face” when rolling over everything like a bulldozer! Song is a heavy one also when it comes to the lyrics. The story is based on the Jonestown tragedy in 1978 when the American tv-preacher Jim Jones founded his own cult “Peoples Temple”. In the end, Jones and his followers murdered/forced into suicide 909 people, over 300 of them minors (also very small children and babies) in Guyana, where they had their own “agricultural project”. Simply a horrible story, it’s impossible to comprehend how the parents have been able to poison their children with cyanide… The short spoken parts by Jim Jones in the beginning and at the end of the song are taken from the audio tapes which have been recorded while the massacre took place.  

Matti: “Sacred Sleep” is a good example of things I personally like in music and it represents my way of writing songs very well. Heavy riffing combined with melodic guitar parts and some surprising twists as supplements. 

2. Man Made God:

One of the three songs on the album which are co-written by Kimmo Blom. Song’s basic is on both the heavy guitar riff in the intro and in the verses as well on the airy, catchy, and harmonic chorus! In the middle section, after one of Henri’s coolest guitar solos ever, the song takes a breath before plunging into the final exploding chorus!

The lyrics of the song are inspired by one of the biggest legends in pop music! No, we won’t tell you who gotta keep it exciting..! 

3. Once I Had a Heart:

This one ended up being the title track of the album, and it was one of the new tracks written on the album. Probably the newest one together with “Oathkeeper”. The song is a story of a person who’s thinking back on his life and reflecting on whether he has made the right decisions or not.

Niko: I remember well the moment we got the song’s chorus together. We were just humming the melody lines together with the guys and had the biggest of smiles on our faces! It’s gotta be one of the best choruses we’ve ever written! 

4. Oathkeeper:

We wanted to write one more aggressive and faster song on the album. Matti had this idea of “Iced Earth -like” guitar riff (or two, or three riffs… ;)) and then we had a go! Ironically, the theme of the song ended up being connected to Iced Earth (or to one of their members, to be exact) as well… Henri: Matti introduced the music at the time of the United States Capitol attack, to which also one of the Iced Earth members was connected later. As usual, my lyrics are about observing and wondering about the world and humanity. Even this one has a big ironic vibe, music being influenced by Iced Earth, there is no intention only to judge, it is not my job. Yes, violence is wrong in any circumstance, but what makes people choose to act like that? Apparently, sometimes people believe in something so blindly that they take a path, which is obviously wrong. And does it make the person entirely bad or evil? I don’t believe so.

5. Face the Light:

This song has evolved over several years, it almost ended up already on AYNE album, but we saw that its potential was not yet fully unleashed back then. After co-producing among the whole band it ended up a very melodic, middle-tempo piece, with a nice grooving main riff and a sing-along-type chorus, which also happens to be super challenging for the vocalist, luckily Mikael’s vocal range and ability are remarkable;)

Henri: The lyrics of the song are quite personal. I don’t want to go into too much detail to give everyone an opportunity to interpret it through their own experiences. Anyways, the universal themes in the song include things like “you should not take anything for granted” and “ life can catch you off guard any time, pulling the rug under your feet but you should not give up”. Also, “sometimes we are prisoners of our own mind, and the keys to freedom can only be found within, nobody else can do it for you”. Actually, Mikael gave the final touch to the lyrics in the chorus, and after he said that this song is the story of his life. And I can assure you, I did not write the lyrics about Mikael;) I feel that we succeeded on many levels with this one.

6. Read My Mind:

Probably the oldest track on the album. This one was co-written by Kimmo Blom, too. Very straight-to-the-point, striking, and catchy song! Combination of heavy, pulsating verse and the adherent, sing-along chorus. The story is about a situation where a person realizes/understands that the relationship with someone else has reached the point of no return. Maybe the most defining line of the lyrics: ”No use in keep on wasting more of our lives…” 

7. Colder:

As said before, we normally take quite a lot of time to make a song ready. This time it was different. “Colder” was written more or less at once! The song is a bit older and was written by the late Kimmo Blom, who was at that point our singer. We kinda decided that “Now we’ll make a song, let’s do it!”. And only a couple of hours later we had the song together. With the lyrics and the irresistible melodies that the song has! 

8. The Final Act:

The Final Act is an uptempo song that flirts with earlier years of Dyecrest bringing also a bit lighter power metal kind of vibes to the album. There can be found some influences from bands such as Blind Guardian and Gamma Ray, but still sounds like a pure Dyecrest song. Again, there are strong catchy melodies and this piece also features some keyboard soloing by Pirkka!

Henri: “The Final Act'' is a counterpart or a continuation to the song “The Stage is Set” on the previous AYNE-album”. In this one, the story is written from another perspective, revealing also how it ends.

The theme of both songs came from the news, reading about child brides. Again, the themes are still universal. There are many levels of abuse everywhere around us, controlling and using people for your own amusement or benefit. In “The Final Act” this comes to an end. Sadly, in the real world, this is not often the case. 

9. Fire From Your World:

A song that couldn’t be in any other place than the final track on the album. After this one, you really have the feeling that there’s nothing more to say. Pirkka had more or less every part of the song composed with the piano, and then we put the parts together in the right way as a band and wrote the roaring ending for the song. The song has amazing vulnerability as well as incredible power. Of course, you can count this one as a ballad, but for sure it’s not just another typical metal ballad. 

Niko: In my opinion probably the most magnificent song Dyecrest has ever written. Proud to be part of the gang that wrote this one. The story is about “the universal mystery”: a mortal falls in love with a goddess, which means that there are no happy endings coming up. No matter how deep and passionate the feelings are, there just ain’t a way to cross the line between two different worlds…