LOST SOCIETY// Smoke Beer

Smoke beer, they don’t give a fuck. Lost Society run four-deep in Jyvaskyla, Finland. Finland is fucking cold. Lost Society melt their beard-icicles with an old school thrash ATTACK! Their hometown, Jyvaskyla (you can’t say it) rests on the western Finnish lakeland. If Samy Elbanna was a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle, he’d be Michaelangelo. He’s got mad skills on his axe of choice, skateboards from A-to-B, and is ready to party at a moment’s notice. It’s party time excellent in the Lost Society camp, celebrating the release of Terror Hungry, their hellraising follow-up to debut Fast Loud Death. Germans say it’s “adrenalingeschwängertes Herzblut.” If names of sweet WWII tanks are anything to go by, the longer the word in German, the more awesome the thing described. Or evil. Evilawesome. Cue Samy lazing in the Finnish spring sun, a balmy -2C outside. Very invigorating.

You’re a skater, Samy. It sucks skating in icy-cold winter.
The winter is a pain in the ass in every way, here. You can’t do anything for six months.

That’s fucked.
Totally.

A lot of Finnish metal is a soundtrack for running a bath to slash your wrists in. Contrast Lost Society with a pulse. Where do you find the energy when half your year is cold and dark and shitty?
[laughs] It’s so true! Most of the stuff in Finland is like that. Very dark music. They’re taking inspiration from the darkness. For us, we’ve turned it the other way. We just go to the practice place and have a good time with the guys.

I always thought the biggest party band in Finland was Children of Bodom. The video where they get a big wad of cash from their label and buy half a liquor store with it.
[laughs] Oh dude, that’s an awesome video.

I remember seeing that with some friends. We paused it, rushed off to the bottle shop. Bought some Jim Beam, downed it and watched on repeat all night. Are you guys into that kind of party?
We definitely like to have a good time. Especially in summer, there’s a lot of parks and stuff. We go there with a huge gang, take a couple of acoustic guitars and a lot of booze. That’s what good evenings are made of.

Booze is pretty expensive up there, from what I’ve heard.
It totally is. The alcohol tax is just going upwards all the time. It’s not the best place to live if you have an alcohol problem. [laughs] We live somehow.

There’s a graphic floating around the Internet showing how many metal bands there is in a country per person. It went from yellow to red. Redder the country, the more bands it had. Finland glowed like a fuckin’ fire.
That’s definitely the way it goes. In Finland, people have taken to metal almost as much as they have pop music. It’s very common when a new album chart comes out every week, half of the charts are metal albums. Or hard rock, something like this. People have taken it overboard. In Helsinki, there’s this church where the priest is a huge metalhead and he has a “heavy metal church” or something like that. But you see just from that, metal is fuckin’ huge over here.

“In Helsinki, there’s this church where the priest is a huge metalhead and he has a ‘heavy metal church’ or something like that.”

It’s only been a year since Short Fast Loud, and now you’re Terror Hungry. Did you do much support for the first record?
We did a tour in Finland and a few shows in Germany. Last year, the highlight of my entire life was when we went to Japan. We did one show, the Loudpark festival. It was just amazing for us. This year we started doing our first full-length European tour with Suicidal Angels and Fueled By Fire. That was really sick. We haven’t been to other areas like the US, because it’s a really expensive thing to do.

It felt like a quick trip from first album to second.
Last summer, when we had a lot of the songs done we called our label, Nuclear Blast, and asked them “Can we record the album already?” Then they said to please send them a demo. We had this really shitty recording device in our practice place. When you listen to the songs you can’t hear anything, basically. Except for like, drums and  shit. Then they asked us to do a professional demo. We just did it because it was a good time for us. Just a few days of recording cool songs and going drinking afterwards. We won’t say no to that.

So, what’s it like ringing up your label and panhandling for cash? “Hey Nuclear Blast, uh, can you front us a couple bucks?”
From the point that we’ve signed to them, we’re still amazed that we were. It’s incredible to see who our label mates are and stuff. They’re really laid back guys, the same as us. It’s kind of the same way on that Children of Bodom video.

Yes! Hands in their pockets, begging their manager like naughty schoolkids…
It was such a good idea to make that video. I’ve been watching it since I was a kid. I just can’t get over it. It’s good to see because Children of Bodom are one of the darker bands in Finland and they’re just really laidback dudes. You know, they’re not always sad and slitting their wrists.

[laughs] Thinking about it, calling your band Children of Bodom is like calling your band Children of Columbine or Children of Port Arthur. It’s the site of a brutal massacre that shocked an entire nation. We don’t realise it over here, but it’s pretty fucked up.
People got pretty well over it. I don’t even know if they got any evidence from that Bodom incident.

Hardcore. Some say Lost Society would be “winners at the Thrash-Olympics.” What events are held at the Thrash-Olympics, and how would you win?
Well, I’m pretty sure every event in that place would have something to do with alcohol. We actually planned that we’d do something like that in the summer. We’d have like, this old-school American Pie kind of attitude to it. A huge gang of people and we’d have a small Beer-Olympics or something.

Over here, what we sometimes say when you’re drunk is that you’re “para.” Short for “paralytic.” So what some friends of mine did was make up a “Para-Olympics.”
Dude, that’s genius!

Drunk three-legged race, drunk skolling, drunk bike race. It’s great, you should try it.*
That’s awesome. I gotta tell the other guys about these events … I think they’ll like those.

After the Para-Olympic hangover, what are your plans?
I think this is gonna be a really fun year once again. Last year, all of our wildest dreams came true after Fast Loud Death came out. I wouldn’t really rule out anything … but I wouldn’t know what to expect. It’s all gonna be about touring, writing and having a good time. Just living the dream.

*Do not actually try this, ever. If you do, you are retarded. //

TERROR HUNGRY, out now via Nuclear Blast!