Track By Tracks: Aitheer - The Serpent (2025)

The Album as a whole:

Niko: With The Serpent album, I feel like Aitheer has began really finding its voice in a way that feels like a very natural progression. This album represents a huge leap forward fo us - it's a reflection of where we've been, but also a determined step into uncharted territory. It's our debut full-length, and I am grateful of the experience of making it. It's been a learning curve both in terms of sound and creative process.

The act of pushing boundaries, not just musically, but emotionally and atmospherically became very important. I always wanted to make something that isn't easily classified - a record where metal, rock, jazz, classical, and ambient elements can coexist without feeling forced. There are no safe spaces here; The album flows with intensity, unpredictability, and a sense of freedom. It's challenging in some ways, but I think that's what makes it feel alive.

We didn't approach this album with a specific genre in mind. Instead, we allowed the music to evolve naturally as we went along. Sure, there are moments that are darker and more aggressive - The Dance of Twins, for example, starts in familiar extreme metal territory, but then shifts into something completely unexpected. The aggression of the heavier side of our stuff is balanced with subtle moments like East and Flame, where we step into more acoustic and classical guitar territory. I find it important for the band to show different sides of us as musicians and to show how far we're willing to stretch musically.

I think the album feels like a true reflection of the band - our personalities, our growth, and our willingness to take risks. I think fans will hear that confidence in the way the album builds, with moments of total chaos followed by subtle and less loud passages. It's a journey, not just through different genres but through different emotional and mental landscapes, too.

At the same time, I'm aware that this isn't an easy listen for everyone. It's not a record that stays in one place too long. For us, that's part of the beauty of it. It's unapologetically itself, and I think that will connect with people who are open to something a little more unconventional. We wanted to create an experience, not just a collection of songs. It feels like the right step forward. I'm really proud to finally share it with our fans.

Track by track

1. Prologue:

Niko: A prologue for the album. This came off as really intense. It's an instrumental synth song with a larger-than-life, theatrical feel. It was created when Lassi and I were playing two keyboards at my place. I shouted some notes for him to play based on my sketches, to see if they matched with what I was doing. We recorded it immediately, and then I added some guitar later on in the studio. The idea behind the track was to start with a very simple set of notes and gradually build towards disharmony, with the concept of sort of fragmentating something very basic into a plurality of elements. It captures the mentality and atmosphere in less than a minute. It builds and builds, until it feels like the synths and guitar are screaming for resolution. It keeps screaming for it, and before you know it, the next song begins, blasting through that peak for you.

2. The Dance of Twins:

Niko: This track is one of the most aggressive, darkest, and heaviest Aitheer songs yet. It's also a very progressive and suprising, though. It starts with a kind of black metal feel, then transitions into a groovy acoustic folk rock and hard rock phases. It eventually returns to the doomy, heavy, dissonant style, capturing one of the album's darkest vibes, before growing into an epic, melodic metal section featuring saxophone and shredding guitar solos as its final peak.

This song is also the longest I've written, so at first I thought it shouldn't be a single. But this song quickly became my favorite song on the album, so I thought, "Screw it, let's bring this up and highlight it as a single." I feel that this will be a tight live song. It really pours with a heavy hand and showcases how we can floor the gas pedal during our most aggressive moments.

3. East:

Acoustic duo song. It continues the acoustic atmosphere from the outro of the previous metal song and bridges it to another metal track. I was almost certain that it wouldn't make it onto the album, but the second guitarist, Lassi, kept insisting that if I didn't include it, he'd use it somewhere himself. So, in the interest of protecting my composition from being stolen, haha, I thought "Alright, let's keep it there." The surrounding songs felt like they needed some sort of transition between them, both harmonically and moodwise, and this track seemed to fit that role. It has an unexpected oriental vibe to it.

4. Law:

Niko: This was a song's composition started from a piano line I was jamming on my keyboard. I wrote almost all of the song's base structure with just the piano, and after that, I began arranging other instruments on top of it. It's definitely one of the most classical-influenced Aitheer songs regarding the harmonic progressions. Overall, it has a feel of a heavy metal ballad in a progressive metal/rock setting. It starts more aggressively with growls but soon breaks down into very mellow parts, then slowly builds energy through hypnotic sections. It builds emotional intensity with the clean vocals and then switches back to the heavier side with a math rock bridge that expands the clean vocals into epic vocal harmonies. Finally, the vocal harmonies are joined by screaming vocals, and the song explodes into a groovy, energetic, and super-epic prog rock ending, with lots of interesting twists in the drum beat.

5. Clairvoyance:

Niko: Oh yes, Clairvoyance. This is an electric guitar duo, and it's a mellow, ambient-influenced electric guitar song that uses these large-sounding combinations of delays, volume knob swells, and whammy bar techniques. These elements make the track very dramatic and give it an ambient touch. Although it's mostly mellow, it's also somewhat insidious, with a subtle disharmony that keeps the listeners on their toes in a kind of rough but nuanced way. Overall, it's a very harmonic and emotionally charged piece of music. The sound of those two guitars added some important new vibes for me. I find that this song was probably the most "jazzy" on the album, but it also drew heavily from classical music influences, as did all of the instrumental duo tracks on the album. There's a bit of dystopian imagery and feeling behind it, which reminded me of the atmosphere that Vangelis created for the original Blade Runner soundtrack. That sense of cinematic mood definitely influenced the sound on some level.

6. The Serpent:

Niko: This one was the most obvious choice for a single. It was the first song I started working on for the album, already in the recording/mixing phase of our previous EP, Sleeper. Composing this song marked a kind of transition for me, as it changed how I approached the process of composition through instruments other than guitar, which has always been my main instrument. The creation of this song was really led by these groovy, but extremely weird, bass lines, which reflect the song's title with their slithering, serpentine sequences. They came off as very atypical bass lines, and you can probably hear that it's a guitarist playing bass, haha.

I see The Serpent actually as a very straightforward, hypnotic rock song, with metal influences - very dynamic in the way it sounds and builds up. This is by far the most psychedelic and cinematic song I've written, and it was also the first Aitheer song with lyrics in Finnish. All in all, it's a very experimental song, even though the song's structure is quite straightforward.

This song also included some studio accidents that ended up adding something valuable. One of those moments occurred when we were recording vocals, and I sang a line that I didn't think was very good. As a frustrated reaction, I improvised a small bluesy line, which our studio guy Harri picked up. I told him to delete it, but he convinced me to keep it. After some time, I ended up liking it a lot.

Another instance came during the dark, psychedelic bridge part. I had written some wrong notes for the guitar part in a computer program, and that ended up having this very metallic, clanging sound. It was really unplayable with the guitar like that shimmer sound so much that I tried to replicate the same dissonance through both guitar and synth.

This led me on quite a trip to make the whole section filled with these eerie, dreamlike, cinematic sounds. It really ended up being one of my favorite parts on the record. It has a kind of oriental type of feel in the drumming before it transitions into an epic build-up with a shrieking guitar solo, before blasting the listener back to the chorus with a low-tuned guitar and a huge synth wall.

7. Flame:

Niko: This is the second acoustic track on the record, and it's the final song. This is one of the most emotional songs the band has ever created. The recording of this song became a little tedious since Lassi and I recorded it twice. The first time, it just didn't have what it needed. It needed more feeling. We let it breathe for a few months, then rearranged it. When we started practicing it together, I remember thinking, "Wow, this is how it's done." It's a very melodic and beautiful acoustic piece.

This is one of the songs on the album that is nowhere near our general sound or what we've done in the past. A moody, melancholic piece of music. It represents a mellower side of us, one that has already been introduced and woven into the bigger picture of the album, so I wouldn't expect it to come off to fans as an overwhelmingly huge shock, haha.

This track marks the band's willingness to explore genres outside of our core foundation in metal and rock. I think it's a great, classical- and jazz-influenced instrumental ballad. A beautiful conclusion to the album.