HIM

After conquering the rest of the world with chart-topping albums and sold-out tours that have seen them play before literally hundreds of thousands of fans over the last decade, Finland’s finest, HIM are finally making their proper American debut with Dark Light.

Some musicians might feel pressure, but HIM front man Ville Valo had one concern in making Dark Light – bettering himself. “I think it’s good to find yourself in different spots philosophically and mentally. To go a bit crazy every now and then is good for you; it’s healthy. And it’s good to put your fingers into the power sockets and see what happens; that’s what you’ve got to do mentally with songs as well. You’ve got to try and reach certain new areas within yourself if that’s possible,” he says, “it’s the thing that keeps me going.”

To challenge oneself means doing things a little differently. “I wanted to do all the songs really fast so I could just go into a rehearsal place, take a couple of beers, have a bit more rock and punkier edge and go for a bit more straight-forward songs,” Valo says as he hangs out, with a few beers, at New York’s famed Electric Ladyland studios while he and producer Tim Palmer (Robert Plant, U2) go over mixes for Dark Light.

The band also recorded for the first time in the States, holing up for several weeks in the famed Paramour house in Silver Lake, California. “We wanted to do the album in the States because we never worked here before,” Valo says.

Though the elegant Paramour, once a monastery, offered a vibe the band has found worked before. “We did one album in the countryside of Wales in England back in ’99. I wanted to do the same, where the whole band would be staying [here] during the entire recording period. It’s a bit more brotherly kind of vibe rather than working in the big city where you’ve to take taxis too and fro. So it’s a bit more peaceful here,” he says.

Despite the exterior changes, Valo knew exactly what he was striving for musically in the writing of Dark Light. “I wanted them to be cool live songs, straight in the face kind of stuff. But it’s really melodic at the same time. And I wanted to have a line between the songs. They were written in a short period of time so they kind of have the same vibe more or less,” he says. As for the mood he was aiming for he says, “It’s crazy surreal, it’s weird, it’s David Lynch, it’s Tim Burton, but with all those things happening within the AC/DC context. You can still shake your hips to it, bang your head, or play air guitar.”

The results are the kind of songs that have made HIM global rock stars, earning Valo a recent spot on the cover of British metal magazine Kerrang! alongside Ozzy Osbourne and Slash.

Dark Light kicks off with the musically ambitious “Vampire Heart,” a number that starts with a fast-paced hard rock beat and includes a series of subtle tempo changes. All the while Valo delivers such signature HIM lines as “lead you along this path in the dark where I belong until I feel your warmth hold me like you held onto life when all fears came alive and entombed me love me like you loved the sun scorching the blood of my vampire heart.” Yes, Dark Light is classic HIM, the kind of tales of love and desire that inspire fans to worship at the altar of the almighty Heartagram.

Among the standout tracks on the 10-song collection are the infectious “Under The Rose,” in which Valo sings, “I’ve been burning in water and drowning in flame/To prove you wrong and scare you away”; as well as “Killing Loneliness,” a hauntingly melodic rocker that begins with a piano intro and includes a memorable hook; the lovely mid-tempo title track, a classic rock ballad; the thunderous “The Face Of God,” and the guitar-propelled sinister closer, “In The Night-Side Of Eden,” which fades out with a machine-like beat and a Vincent Price-esque vocal saying, “Forever we are, forever we be, forever we’ll be crucified.” The first single is the hauntingly dynamic “Rip Out The Wings Of A Butterfly.”

While Valo might not have let any pressure seep in to the making of Dark Light, he is aware of the significance of the album, which is partly where the album’s title comes from. “To me it’s a new start; a new contract, new countries and new bars to visit, see new people, and we’ve never had an album named after a song, so that’d be cool.”

The title has greater meaning as well, and like the music, keeps in tradition with the storied HIM past. “My last name, Valo, means light in Finnish. And the word dark if you translate it straight, it just means ‘the crazy being.’ Dark, in Finnish language, meaning kind of ‘losing the plot.’ So it’s kind of like a pun in language,” he says. “And Dark Light is nice because we had albums called Deep Shadows and Bitter Highlights and Razorblade Romance, so we’ve always had these opposites. It’s like the trademark.”

Dark Light is, in many ways, classic HIM; it’s haunting, gothic, rocking, beautiful, melodic, and an album that can only come from Valo and his mates. But at the same time, this is a new HIM, the one that Valo has always envisioned. “I like it all,” he says of the album. “It’s very much what I wanted us to be since the beginning. We’re getting closer.”