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Ville Valo is a man with a million stories to tell, and some of them are even true. He’s charming and witty, peppering conversations with brilliant poetic statements that could be printed on t-shirts. He could also sell you your own teeth. Because Ville Valo is a bullshitter extraordinaire. Not a liar, more a master in the art of twisted tales and exaggerated truths.
The story of HIM – the band he formed in Helsinki, Finland in the early 90s with schoolmates Mikko ‘Mige’ Paananen (bass) and Mikko ‘Linde’ Lindström (guitars) – has the kind of dramatic twists and turns that would make for a great Hollywood biopic. Albums recorded during historic storms, being handcuffed to a bed by armed police, actual brushes with death. As the saying goes, ‘Never let the truth get in the way of a good story.’
“I think it’s more, ‘Don’t let your memories get in the way of a good story’,” says Ville, flashing a vulpine smile. “All the best stories are true – you might edit yourself or leave stuff out for drama, but I’ve always been a shit liar.”
“All the melancholy and darkness of HIM could be traced to my dog.
Ville Valo
Tall tales or not, it’s undeniable that HIM are one of modern metal’s most iconic bands. At their peak, they were topping charts at home and overseas, while their frontman became a bona fide 21st-century pin-up. Along with Nightwish and Children Of Bodom, they helped transform Finland from a metal backwater to a major international hub before splitting in 2017, breaking a million gothic hearts.
2026 marks the 30th anniversary of Him’s debut EP, 666 Ways to Love: Prologue, so it’s the perfect time to get the singer to look back on the rise, demise and potential resurrection of the band who put the ‘love’ in ‘love metal’.
“It can be quite a long-winded and boring story,” Ville warns Hammer. He’s definitely lying when he says that.
While the story of HIM doesn’t quite start in the cradle, it’s a near thing. Ville first met Mige when he was just eight years old and Linde when he was 12. Three awkward kids with an obsessive love for music, everything clicked when they discovered Black Sabbath as teenagers. Picking up tapes from mates and local record stores, they gathered at Mige’s house and decided to form their own occult-flavoured group.
“It was our first clandestine operation – four boys gathered in Mige’s mother’s larder listening to church bells tolling,” Ville says with a chuckle.
We were pussies - Satan worship lite.
Ville Valo
Dubbed His Infernal Majesty – later shortened to HIM – the band reflected its members’ shared passion for doomy, dark music.
“All the melancholy and darkness of HIM could be traced to my dog, Sami,” Ville says. “He was my furry brother. He passed when I was six, and it was my first real brush with melancholy.”
HIM weren’t alone in pursuing the darker arts. The likes of Type O Negative and Paradise Lost were blurring the lines between doom and goth, and HIM enthusiastically devoured their latest releases while trying to find their sound. In the early days, both Ville and Mige played bass, while the former tried his best King Diamond impression. But it wasn’t Paradise Lost’s Nick Holmes or Type O’s Peter Steele who gave them their eureka moment.
“Chris Isaak helped us find our own musical identity,” Ville reveals, of the US singer whose dark-hued croon and twanging presented a kind of gothic Americana. “I’d heard Wicked Game on the [1990 David Lynch movie] Wild At Heart soundtrack, so went to the public library, took out the LP, and me and Linde sat down working out the riffs.”
HIM recorded their own version of Wicked Game, swapping the original’s tremolo guitars for chunkier riffs and leaning into its darker inclinations while retaining the pop edge. After years of unsuccessfully shopping demos around, the song helped score them a deal with major label BMG.
Released in October 1996 and produced by Hiili Hiilesmaa, their debut EP, 666 Ways To Love: Prologue, was a pointer to the future, both artistically and commercially - and amazingly, it gave this little-known band a Top 10 hit in their homeland.
A little over a year later, the band released their full-length debut album, Greatest Love Songs Vol. 666. Decidedly more polished, this time the album peaked at No.2 on the Finnish charts, but also edged into the Top 50 in Germany. But while HIM had seemingly struck gold with a combination of thumping metal riffs and pop-friendly choruses, the fact they were sticking triple sixes on their records and had originally been called ‘His Infernal Majesty’ didn’t escape notice.
“I got some of my first TV interviews explaining to people that Him was more to do with the infernal aspects of the heart than burning down a church,” Ville says.
“Black metal was the punk rock of the 90s – it was the big spiritual vomit over everything. I loved it, but a lot of those bands took themselves very, very seriously. I was in a pub once with a guy from a black metal band and he goes, ‘You’ve never experienced darkness until you’ve strangled your own cat and looked into its eyes as it’s dying.’ That’s a terrible thing to do to an innocent critter. We were just pussies – Satan worship lite.”
If HIM’s debut album saw them step out of the shadows, the follow-up thrust them squarely into the spotlight. By the time they began work on their second album, 2000’s Razorblade Romance, they’d started to build a serious fanbase in Europe. But there was a problem.
Producer Hiili Hiilesmaa had helped the band find their sound on their first two releases. This time around, though, the songs they were recording sounded “like shit”. With recording costs rising, HIM were starting to feel the pressure.
“I think the label were always on the verge of letting us go,” Ville admits.
They were cheering and toasting each other with champagne, we had to share a pint
Ville Valo
Scrapping the work they’d done, HIM met with producer John Fryer and started anew at Rockfield Studios in Wales. Fryer helped the band refine their electronic ideas into a “more Billy Idol, 80s-inspired record”.
The album’s breakthrough single was an accident. Asked for a track to put on 1999 sci-fi movie Thirteenth Floor, HIM offered the only song they’d actually finished at that point, a piano-led gothic power ballad titled Join Me In Death.
Their label weren’t enthused about the song but, with no alternative, they released it on November 2, 1999. Join Me In Death hit No.1 in both Germany and Finland.
“Mige and I were sat in the pub when the record company called from Germany,” Ville recalls. “They were cheering and toasting each other with champagne, and me and Mige only had two quid between us, so we had to share a pint.”
The song’s success was a sign of things to come. Released on January 24, 2000, Razorblade Romance topped the charts in Germany, Finland and Austria. They celebrated with their biggest European tour yet, including a show at Stuttgart’s Hanns-Martin-Schleyer-Halle, a 15,000-capacity arena. A month later, they were starting from scratch again at the rather more intimate London club The Garage.
“We were never just walking on roses,” Ville admits. “There was always a little struggle, and I think that was good for the band. You get a band like [2021 Eurovision winners] Måneskin, for example, who become humongous all at once. If I’d been in a band like that, I’d have died within six months.”
They came close anyway. There was an undeniable buzz around HIM on their first UK tour, and the charismatic frontman was fast becoming a star. The parties could get out of hand. At one, Ville almost slipped from a hotel balcony.
“There were two parties in different rooms, and I kept hopping between the balconies,” he explains. “At one point I just tried to jump out a window when I’d drunk too much. A friend was able to drag me down and slap me across the face.”
HIM also made one of their most important connections on that first UK tour. After their Garage debut, they were visited by Jackass star Bam Margera. Bam became obsessed with HIM and struck up a friendship with Ville, visiting him while making skating videos in Helsinki.
Within 12 months, Jackass had taken off globally. Bam used his newfound fame to spread the word of his favourite band and to bring them to the USA. After sharing European festival stages with the Bloodhound Gang, that band’s singer, Jimmy Pop, offered to put Razorblade Romance out in the US.
A name dispute with a jazz group meant the first pressings of Razorblade… in the US were actually attributed to ‘HER’, though it was resolved before their next album was released. HIM were caught up in a hurricane, except there was no calm in the eye of this storm.
“From 1999 to 2003, I can’t remember too much,” Ville says. “Not because I was drinking too much, but because so much was happening it was hard to take it all in. I just let myself go and see where the river of shit, piss and blood takes me.”
The follow-up to Razorblade Romance, 2001’s Deep Shadows And Brilliant Highlights, wasn’t the success HIM had hoped it would be. While it still topped the charts in Finland and Austria, label interference had hampered their creative process. Things were combustible within the band too.
“We were breaking up every other night,” Ville recalls of the touring HIM undertook after 2000. “But I was adamant about the whole rock’n’roll thing and didn’t let go. I’d go to all the parties, I’d write literally all the time. My thinking was, ‘This well might run dry’, and it took a good decade to realise that they’ll still brew beers even if I’m not drinking it. I’m not just talking about alcohol there, but experiences.”
It was with their fourth album, Love Metal, that everything changed once more for HIM. Released on April 11, 2003, it became their first record to chart in the UK, hitting No.55, while in the US it reached No.117 on the Billboard 200. Recharged and creatively refreshed, HIM were on their way to becoming a global phenomenon.
The iconic Heartagram design – conceived by Ville and featured subtly in past works – was front and centre on the album’s artwork. Before long, that logo could be found everywhere from t-shirts, hoodies and bags to tattoos, stickers and even car decals. But with this burgeoning fame came more invasions of privacy.
A fan attacked me with scissors
Ville Valo
Ville blacked out the windows of his Helsinki home with bin-liners when overeager fans would camp out in hopes of catching a glimpse of him. Worse still, he recalls times some people turned up and started smashing those same windows.
“I had to call the cops a few times,” he says. “At the time, I just felt pissed off – my house was the one place in the world I had privacy and could just be me without any pressure from outside forces. Having that sacred space violated felt terrible.”
There were also times where he was physically threatened.
“A fan did attack me with scissors once,” he says. “She just came up laughing like a raving lunatic and cut a piece of my hair off. It was like a scene from a horror movie.”
Partly spurred on by events like that, HIM decided to leave Europe when they started working on their next album. The band had mixed Love Metal in Los Angeles while staying in the infamous ‘Riot House’, roving the streets like wide-eyed tourists pointing out the bars and clubs that had shaped rock history. So for the follow-up, they returned to the city to see if inspiration would strike.
“My idols were people like [famously dissolute author Charles] Bukowski, these walking disaster artists,” Ville says. “I thought it was all part of the experience, being out in Silver Lake, getting fucked up on Mai Tais in a bar, scribbling lyrics. I found that exhilarating – like I was part of a legacy of rock’n’roll in a way. Those were my ‘hobo goth’ years.”
Their time in LA was chaotic but productive. It resulted in HIM’s biggest commercial success: 2005’s Dark Light. The album amped up their glammiest aspects while still being undeniably gothic, producing massive singles like Wings Of A Butterfly and Killing Loneliness. It earned HIM a gold certification in the US – the first for any Finnish metal band.
"It wasn't a lost weekend, but a lost couple of years."
Ville Valo
If things were flying professionally, they were less healthy for Ville personally. He’d always loved to party, but things were getting out of control. There were gigs where he’d be too drunk to perform.
“It was a really messed-up time,” he admits. “Not a lost weekend, but a lost couple of years. All the things you see in the movies, you end up there and realise it’s not actually that interesting.”
By 2007, Ville was a wreck. He reached a point where he couldn’t even sleep through the night without waking up to have a beer. He was shitting and vomiting blood (he remembers looking down and thinking, “That can’t be good”, but didn’t have time to see a doctor). Rumours abounded the singer had cancer (he didn’t). After splitting with his longtime partner, he was more isolated than ever. And then he had a nervous breakdown.
“I woke up on a sofa to the hooting of an owl,” he says. “I remember feeling like it was almost something from a movie. I didn’t know who I was, what I was doing or why I was there. Everything just crashed down around me.”
I found refuge in doom metal
Ville Valo
Although he recovered, it was only enough to get underway with writing the next HIM album. 2007’s Venus Doom is by far the heaviest thing the band released, clearly linked to the dismal mental state of its creator at the time. But Ville also found comfort in returning to the music that had inspired HIM in the first place.
“I found my refuge in doom metal while working on that album – it became my sanctuary from the world,” he says.
As soon as Venus Doom was completed, Ville checked himself into rehab in Los Angeles.
“I was staying very near to the place where [hellraising 80s comedian John] Belushi died, so [dying] was on my mind,” Ville says. “But our manager, Seppo [Vesterinen] was really helpful. I told him I needed help and he was like, ‘It happens to the best of us, don’t worry about it.’ He’d dealt with Andy McCoy and Michael Monroe, all the crazy Hanoi Rocks guys back in the day, so he was really mellow about it, which helped because I was so ashamed.”
Getting sober didn’t just save Ville’s life, it saved the band. But it wasn’t easy by any stretch. In 2007, HIM got a once-in-a-lifetime offer to support Metallica around Europe, ending with a massive performance at Wembley Stadium. It was a dream gig, but incredibly difficult for the freshly sober Ville.
“I just felt naked and sensitive. It was like being a baby – everything was too loud and too much,” he admits. “There’s no school and no teachers for this stuff. Nobody is going to tell you in advance when burnout is going to happen – you just keep going until you do. Everybody has their war stories, but nobody’s been in the same war.”
If the story of HIM really was a Hollywood biopic, this would be where the freshly sober Ville and the gang would make a dazzling comeback. Real life didn’t quite work out like that. 2010’s Screamworks: Love In Theory And Practice was a reaction to the darkness of its predecessor, with the band sounding poppier than ever before.
Although Screamworks achieved respectable chart placements, there was a sense both internally and externally that HIM’s star was on the wane and life was catching up with them fast. Plans to quickly record a follow-up to Screamworks stalled when drummer Gas Lipstick was diagnosed with repetitive stress injury, the band instead taking a breather to see if their drummer could recover. He did, returning for 2013’s Tears On Tape.
“After Venus Doom, the vibe had not really felt right,” says Ville. “I’m not sure how that would have been affected if we’d put out something really successful, but we just weren’t feeling it,” Ville admits. “It felt disjointed still being in a band at that point – nobody particularly enjoyed it.”
We were still good friends, we'd just grown apart.
Ville Valo
Released on April 26, 2013, there was no indication at the time that Tears On Tape would be HIM’s final album. But on January 27, 2015, Gas Lipstick announced his departure from the band. Though they had weathered the departure of members before, it was the straw that broke the camel’s back.
“It was a huge crisis,” Ville recalls. “He told us out of the blue, which was weird because we had been together for, like, 20 years at that point. There was no discussion with anyone in the band over coffee or at soundcheck, it was just, ‘I’m leaving.’ Our jaws dropped and we figured, ‘That’s it.’”
It wasn’t, not quite. HIM limped on, recruiting Jukka ‘Kosmo’ Kröger to fulfil drum duties on the Tears On Tape tour. The band even worked on new material with him, but never recorded anything. Then, in March 2017, HIM announced they would be calling it a day after 26 years. The band would play one last tour – the Bang & Whimper tour – across 15 countries, ending with a New Year’s Eve gig at Helsinki’s Tavastia, their favourite NYE concert venue.
“The bittersweet thing about it was that we were still good friends, we’d just grown apart,” Ville says. “In regards to the farewell tour, it was nice to play when we had a finite date that it was going to end. By setting the end date first, you don’t have to have reserves. Every night felt like it was our last in a way.”
Although Him were laid to rest in 2017, Ville returned for his goth metal throne with 2023’s excellent Neon Noir – an album that carried more than a whiff of HIM’s horny, doomed romanticism. His solo project wrapped up activity with a sold-out show at London’s Royal Albert Hall in 2024, on the same night the aurora borealis lit up the skies over Britain.
“These things just happen to me,” Ville says with relish. “But the solo project was great, because we set a framework for what should happen. It’s something I wish we’d done in HIM sooner, but what’s done is done.”
Is it, though? In October 2025, the rumour mills went into overdrive when the ‘Heartagram’ account – effectively Ville’s official Facebook page – updated its cover image to an eye with a Heartagram, as opposed to the modified VV design he’d created for his solo project. Could HIM be about to make a comeback?
Almost 10 years on from their farewell gig, you can still hear the wistfulness in Ville’s voice as he talks about the band, a sense that they didn’t end with the bang that they deserved. Besides, they could still come back and be even bigger than they were the first time around. It’s happened in recent years for everyone from Mudvayne to Acid Bath. So, Ville, is it on?
“Of course I would love to play with the lads again someday. When and if so… I don’t know. I haven’t really been in touch with them much,” he says. “But I miss those fellows. They are my brothers. But there’s also beauty in the fact we didn’t strangle each other at the end, or start travelling in separate limos. So there is that to be said. I felt it was the right way to bury the corpse. HIM Iwas and is my life. It was very hard to let go of that.”
And that is all he has to say on that. For now. Who knows what the future holds – or even the present. Because, as we know, Ville Valo is a silver-tongued devil and there’s every chance the HIM story isn’t over yet.
