Wolfheart

Bio

The most overworked and undervalued busy bee on the Finnish metal scene, Tuomas Saukkonen shocked everyone in 2012 with his announcement that he will bury all of his metal music projects at the same time to start anew. Before The Dawn, Black Sun Aeon, Dawn Of Solace and RoutaSielu received their coup de grâce February 23rd 2013 with one last show, in which material from all the projects was played.

After years of pouring his creative juices to projects too numerous to count, since the end of 2012 Saukkonen has focused on just one labour of love, Wolfheart – the musical entity and form of expression that finally allows him to siphon all his musical genius to just one outlet. Be the approach melodic and hopeful, acoustic and fragile, harsh black/death metal or atmospheric doom, Wolfheart has it all, in a mix like of which you haven’t heard before.

Saukkonen recorded and released the first Wolfheart album “Winterborn” entirely by himself playing all the instruments and doing all the vocals, with Mika Lammassaari (Eternal Tears Of Sorrow, Mors Subita) as his only guest, playing guitar solos. Such confidence Saukkonen showed in his new material that he self-financed the album release. This bold leap of faith was rewarded with sales placing the album to #7 on the Official Finnish Album Chart and to the Pole Position on the alternative indie chart “Rumban Lista” which tracks the sales in specialized record stores not eligible for the official chart. Yet, probably even more rewardingly for Saukkonen, “Winterborn” proved a roaring critical success scoring high ratings in reviews left and right. To cap off a great year for his project, “Winterborn” was elected the best debut album of 2013 in the annual Record Store Äx customers’ poll. Tuomas’ risk had paid off handsomely. Wolfheart deserved to be a fully operating band.

Since the spring of 2014 Wolfheart has been a real, touring band. 2014 / 2015 took the pack on the road to the national stages with Shade Empire and Finntroll, into the international stages with the first European tour with Swallow The Sun and even to Tokyo with Sonata Arctica etc. Also big european / scandinavian festivals were targeted and the climax of the 2015 was the 2nd album “Shadow World” which continued the path of critical praises and placed #7 on the Official Finnish Album Chart. The album was also the first product from the co-operation with Spinefarm records.

After a rapid ride since the release of the debut album the band cleared their calender in the beginning of 2016, started the pre-production of the 3rd album and the legendary Petrax studios (CoB, HIM, Korpiklaani etc.) were booked for spring, only a few selected festival shows broke the studio cycle. The focus has been intense and the scheduled release of the 3rd album is set to the beginning of 2017 and the band is heading back to Europe with Insomnium and Barren Earth in January, making also their UK debut.

Three albums into their career, Wolfheart has become a staple in extraordinarily well-crafted melodic death metal. 3rd effort and tour-de-force to date, “Tyhjyys” (”Emptiness”) brings forth a dramatic, cinematic dimension to the music and turns it into an all-encompassing experience. From February 2013 onwards the name Wolfheart has been synonymous with atmospheric yet brutal Winter Metal.

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