Время и стекло
HIM was a Finnish rock band from Helsinki that existed, with interruptions, from 1991 to 2017. Led by Ville Valo, the group developed its own blend of gothic rock, hard rock, heavy metal and melodic pop rock, which the musicians themselves called love metal.
HIM’s defining feature was the contrast between heavy guitar riffs and romantic songs about love, loss, passion and death. The band’s best-known songs include Join Me in Death, Wicked Game, When Love and Death Embrace, Right Here in My Arms, The Funeral of Hearts, Buried Alive by Love, The Sacrament, Wings of a Butterfly, Killing Loneliness and The Kiss of Dawn.
HIM released eight studio albums, sold more than ten million records and became one of the most successful Finnish rock bands on the international market. The album Dark Light made them the first band from Finland to receive an RIAA Gold certification in the United States.
Early years and His Infernal Majesty
The history of HIM began in Helsinki in 1991, when school friends Ville Valo and bassist Mikko “Mige” Paananen formed a band called His Infernal Majesty.
At the early stage, Valo himself played bass guitar and other instruments, the lineup changed constantly, and the music existed mainly in the form of rehearsals and demo recordings. In the early 1990s, the band broke up after Mige left for military service.
In 1995, Valo revived the project together with guitarist Mikko “Linde” Lindström. Mige soon rejoined, while drummer Juha “Pätkä” Rantala and keyboardist Antto Melasniemi completed the lineup.
Thus, the three musicians who would define the entire subsequent history of HIM — Ville Valo, Mige and Linde — finally came together in the second half of the 1990s.
666 Ways to Love: Prologue
The band’s first official release was the EP 666 Ways to Love: Prologue, issued in a limited edition in Finland in 1996.
It included Stigmata Diaboli, Wicked Game, Dark Sekret Love and The Heartless. Even this short release already contained the core elements of HIM’s future aesthetic: heavy guitars, melancholy, romantic lyrics and Ville Valo’s distinctive low voice.
The reinterpretation of Chris Isaak’s Wicked Game was particularly important. HIM transformed the atmospheric original into a heavy rock song, effectively demonstrating the principle on which a significant part of their own style would later be built.
Greatest Lovesongs Vol. 666
The debut studio album Greatest Lovesongs Vol. 666 was released on November 3, 1997. It was produced by Hiili Hiilesmaa, who had a major influence on the formation of HIM’s early sound.
The album combined the band’s own material with cover versions. It included Your Sweet 666, The Heartless, When Love and Death Embrace, a new version of Wicked Game, as well as an interpretation of Blue Öyster Cult’s (Don’t Fear) The Reaper.
This was where the central theme of Valo’s songwriting fully took shape — the constant coexistence of love and death. HIM’s titles, lyrics and visual presentation were built on opposites: romantic and dark, soft and heavy, beautiful and painful elements existed within the same song.
Greatest Lovesongs Vol. 666 was successful in Finland, after which HIM’s music began spreading through Germany and other countries in Central Europe.
Razorblade Romance and Join Me in Death
The international breakthrough came with the second album Razorblade Romance, released in Finland in late 1999 and receiving wide European distribution in 2000.
By this time, Mika “Gas Lipstick” Karppinen was already playing drums, while Juska Salminen handled keyboards.
The main hit was Join Me in Death. The song was associated with the 1999 science-fiction film The Thirteenth Floor and was used in its promotion. It reached high positions on European charts and was particularly successful in Germany and Finland.
Contrary to an interpretation that is sometimes repeated, the lyrics of Join Me in Death were not intended as an encouragement of suicide. Ville Valo associated the song with the romantic “Romeo and Juliet” model and with the idea of being willing to give up everything for love.
Other important tracks from Razorblade Romance included Right Here in My Arms, Poison Girl, Gone with the Sin, Resurrection and One Last Time.
The album topped the national charts in Finland, Germany and Austria and transformed HIM from a well-known Finnish rock band into an international act.
The classic lineup takes shape
After Razorblade Romance, another keyboard change took place. Janne “Burton” Puurtinen joined the band.
As a result, by the early 2000s the longest-running HIM lineup had formed:
- Ville Valo — vocals;
- Mige — bass guitar;
- Linde Lindström — guitar;
- Burton — keyboards;
- Gas Lipstick — drums.
This five-piece lineup remained together for more than a decade and recorded the majority of the band’s best-known discography.
Deep Shadows and Brilliant Highlights
The third studio album Deep Shadows and Brilliant Highlights was released in 2001.
Compared with the previous two records, the sound became softer and moved much closer to melodic alternative rock and pop rock.
The main songs from this period included Pretending, In Joy and Sorrow, Heartache Every Moment, Close to the Flame and Please Don’t Let It Go.
The making of the album was accompanied by disagreements with the music industry and a search for balance between the band members’ heavier preferences and the producers’ desire to make the material more accessible to radio.
Love Metal
In 2003, the fourth album Love Metal was released. For Ville Valo himself, this record marked the moment when HIM most accurately defined their own musical identity.
The album’s key songs include Buried Alive by Love, The Funeral of Hearts, The Sacrament, Soul on Fire and Sweet Pandemonium.
The record was heavier than its predecessor while preserving HIM’s characteristic melodic quality. The guitar influence of Black Sabbath was combined with gothic melancholy, expressive keyboard parts and chorus structures that were almost pop in form.
What love metal means
The term love metal was coined by HIM themselves in the late 1990s as a response to constant attempts by the music press to place the band within a single specific genre.
Ville Valo explained that HIM were too melodic for traditional metal, yet at the same time too heavy to be considered an ordinary pop or gothic rock band. At the core was a combination of heavy guitars and songs primarily about love.
For that reason, love metal is more accurately understood as HIM’s own stylistic definition rather than as a separate musical genre with clearly established rules.
The title of the fourth album was chosen deliberately: Valo said that when asked “what is love metal?”, the band could now simply point listeners to that record.
Heartagram
An equally important part of HIM was the Heartagram symbol — a combination of a heart and an inverted pentagram.
Ville Valo created it in 1996, on his twentieth birthday. According to the musician’s concept, the symbol expressed the same opposites that formed the basis of HIM’s music: soft and heavy, romantic and dark, and conventionally feminine and masculine elements.
Although the Heartagram had been used earlier, it first became a central element of an album’s visual design on Love Metal. Over time, the symbol became almost independent from specific album covers and developed into a standalone emblem of the band.
Its spread beyond the conventional rock audience was helped by American skateboarder and television personality Bam Margera, who actively used both the symbol and HIM’s music in his own projects.
Bam Margera and the American audience
Ville Valo’s friendship with Bam Margera played a noticeable role in introducing HIM to American audiences during the first half of the 2000s.
Margera directed several music videos for the band, including Buried Alive by Love, The Sacrament, Solitary Man and And Love Said No. Actress Juliette Lewis appeared in the video for Buried Alive by Love.
HIM’s music and the Heartagram also appeared regularly in projects associated with Bam Margera and his circle, helping the band reach American audiences connected with skateboarding, alternative television and youth rock culture.
Dark Light and the American breakthrough
The fifth studio album was Dark Light, released in 2005.
For the record, the band made the sound more compact and accessible, retaining heavy guitars while increasing the role of melodic choruses and carefully constructed studio production.
The main songs were Wings of a Butterfly — titled Rip Out the Wings of a Butterfly on some editions — Killing Loneliness, Vampire Heart and Under the Rose.
Dark Light debuted inside the Top 20 of the Billboard 200 and received RIAA Gold certification in 2006 for sales of more than 500,000 copies in the United States.
HIM became the first Finnish band to have an album certified Gold in the United States.
The period from Love Metal to Dark Light can be regarded as the peak of the band’s international mainstream recognition.
Venus Doom
In 2007, HIM released Venus Doom, one of the heaviest and darkest albums in their discography.
After the more polished sound of Dark Light, the band once again emphasized guitar riffs, longer compositions and doom metal influences.
The main songs included The Kiss of Dawn, Bleed Well, Sleepwalking Past Hope and the title track Venus Doom.
The album reached No. 12 on the Billboard 200 — the highest position ever achieved by a HIM studio album on the US chart.
Screamworks: Love in Theory and Practice
The seventh album, Screamworks: Love in Theory and Practice, was released in 2010.
Unlike the heavy Venus Doom, this record featured faster tempos, brighter synthesizers and a much more immediate melodic approach.
The album included Heartkiller, Scared to Death, Katherine Wheel, Like St. Valentine and Disarm Me (With Your Loneliness).
The themes of love and painful relationships remained, but musically Screamworks became one of HIM’s most energetic and pop-oriented recordings.
Gas Lipstick’s health problems and Tears on Tape
After the Screamworks tour, HIM’s activity temporarily slowed because of health problems affecting drummer Gas Lipstick, who suffered injuries to his arms.
After the musician recovered, the band returned to the studio and released its eighth album, Tears on Tape, in 2013.
The record combined different sides of HIM’s earlier catalog — heavy riffs, melancholic melodies, atmospheric instrumental passages and more traditional rock.
Its main songs included All Lips Go Blue, Tears on Tape, Into the Night and Drawn & Quartered.
Tears on Tape became HIM’s final studio album, although at the time of its creation the band was not yet planning to end its career.
Gas Lipstick leaves the band
At the beginning of 2015, Gas Lipstick announced that he was leaving HIM after sixteen years with the group.
He was replaced by drummer Jukka “Kosmo” Kröger. The lineup of Valo — Mige — Linde — Burton — Kosmo became the final touring version of HIM.
The band continued performing and attempted to work on new material. However, according to Valo, the new songs began to sound too familiar even to the musicians themselves, while the previous creative impulse was no longer there.
Why HIM broke up
In March 2017, HIM announced that they would end their activities after one final world tour.
The breakup was not accompanied by any public conflict. Ville Valo later explained the decision primarily in terms of creative exhaustion: the members tried writing new songs but did not feel that they could say anything genuinely new through them.
The band therefore chose to stop while preserving good relationships between the members.
Bang and Whimper — the farewell tour
The final tour was titled Bang and Whimper 2017 — The Farewell Tour.
It began on June 14, 2017, in Barcelona and included concerts across Europe and North America.
HIM’s final performance took place on December 31, 2017, in Helsinki as part of the band’s traditional Helldone festival.
This brought to an end the history of a band that had existed, with interruptions, for more than a quarter of a century.
Ville Valo after HIM
After the band’s breakup, Ville Valo did not immediately launch a full-scale solo career. In 2020, under the name VV, he unexpectedly released the three-song EP Gothica Fennica Vol. 1.
In January 2023, his first full-length solo album Neon Noir was released.
Valo performed most of the instrumental parts himself and continued developing a musical language close to HIM: heavy and melodic guitars, synthesizers, melancholic choruses and lyrics about love, death and emotional dependence.
Among the main songs of his solo period are Loveletting, Echolocate Your Love, The Foreverlost, Neon Noir and Salute the Sanguine.
Although VV’s material naturally recalls HIM, Valo viewed it as a separate stage rather than as a continuation of the band under another name.
HIM’s catalog and Sony Music Publishing
In 2025, Ville Valo signed a worldwide publishing agreement with Sony Music Publishing Germany.
The deal covers both Valo’s future songwriting and the HIM catalog written by him.
When announcing the agreement, Sony Music Publishing cited more than 10 million records sold by HIM and VV, over 500 million streams, and numerous Gold and Platinum certifications.
Could HIM reunite?
After the farewell tour ended, Ville Valo repeatedly emphasized that there had been no conflict between the former members that would make a return impossible.
In 2026, in an interview with Metal Hammer, he stated directly that he would be happy to play with HIM again someday. According to the musician, the members parted on good terms, and the band remains one of the most important parts of his life.
At the same time, no official HIM reunion, new album or tour has been announced. A possible return therefore remains a wish and an open possibility rather than a confirmed project.
HIM’s musical style
HIM’s sound changed from album to album, so reducing the band exclusively to gothic rock or metal would be an oversimplification.
Their music combined:
- heavy riffs in the tradition of Black Sabbath;
- doom metal and hard rock;
- gothic melancholy;
- alternative rock;
- pop-oriented melodies and expressive choruses;
- synthesizers;
- romantic lyrics.
Among the most obvious reference points for Valo were Black Sabbath and Type O Negative. At the same time, his songs also reveal influences from classic pop, gothic rock and more melodic performers — from Chris Isaak to the tradition of the dramatic love ballad.
This duality explains the term love metal: HIM aimed to make music that was both heavy and sentimental, without treating those qualities as mutually exclusive.
Ville Valo’s vocals and songwriting
Almost the entire core songwriting catalog of HIM is associated with Ville Valo. He wrote the music and lyrics for most of the band’s songs and shaped its visual concept.
His voice became one of HIM’s most recognizable elements. Valo uses a low baritone but is also capable of moving into a much higher and more strained register, allowing a single song to shift from an almost intimate delivery to a large-scale rock chorus.
Valo’s lyrics regularly combine romantic language with imagery of death, religion, physicality and destruction. At the same time, he often uses deliberately exaggerated drama and plays with gothic clichés, so HIM’s symbolism should not always be interpreted literally.
Heartagram and popular culture
The Heartagram became one of the rare rock logos of its era whose recognition extended significantly beyond the band’s own audience.
It could be seen on clothing, skateboards, musical instruments and in Bam Margera’s projects. For part of the American audience, familiarity with the Heartagram came even before familiarity with HIM’s music.
The symbol originally had no independent religious meaning. For Valo, it was a visual equivalent of the music itself — a combination of opposing forces.
HIM studio discography
- Greatest Lovesongs Vol. 666 — 1997;
- Razorblade Romance — 1999/2000;
- Deep Shadows and Brilliant Highlights — 2001;
- Love Metal — 2003;
- Dark Light — 2005;
- Venus Doom — 2007;
- Screamworks: Love in Theory and Practice — 2010;
- Tears on Tape — 2013.
Other important releases
- 666 Ways to Love: Prologue — EP, 1996;
- And Love Said No: The Greatest Hits 1997–2004 — compilation, 2004;
- Uneasy Listening Vol. 1 — compilation of alternative versions, 2006;
- Uneasy Listening Vol. 2 — 2007;
- Digital Versatile Doom — live album and video, 2008;
- XX – Two Decades of Love Metal — compilation, 2012.
HIM’s place in Finnish and international rock music
HIM became one of Finland’s most prominent musical exports of the late 1990s and 2000s. Their international success developed alongside the rise of other Finnish rock and metal bands, but HIM occupied a distinct niche thanks to the combination of heavy music with an openly romantic image.
Razorblade Romance opened the Central European market for the band, Love Metal expressed its artistic concept most clearly, and Dark Light delivered its biggest commercial success in the United States.
HIM’s visual language proved equally enduring. The Heartagram, album artwork, Ville Valo’s stage image and the combination of gothic aesthetics with accessible rock songs became a recognizable part of 2000s alternative culture.
HIM did not invent gothic rock or heavy metal, but they created an instantly recognizable form of heavy romantic music of their own. The term love metal, the Heartagram and songs ranging from Join Me in Death to The Funeral of Hearts made the band one of the most distinctive European rock acts of its generation.
