"We’ve been calling ourselves the Backstreet Boys of the metal scene": Forget Eurovision, Blind Channel are now aiming to conquer the world

After grinding in the Finnish scene for eight years, Blind Channel exploded onto the world’s stage when they entered Eurovision in 2021. Their self-dubbed “violent pop” song, Dark Side, reached No.1 at home and charted internationally, and the band finished the contest in sixth place.

After two years of touring the world, Hammer caught up with vocalists Joel Hokka and Niko Moilanen to find out what lies in store with new album Exit Emotions.

Now that you’re two years removed from your Eurovision experience, how has your approach to music changed?

Joel: “We became rock stars! It changes how you think about life, how you face things, and for sure it changes how you create music. But we’re still the same band who want to rule the world.”

Niko: “Eurovision is an undeniable part of our history, but it’s not where we’re headed. Bring Me The Horizon and Linkin Park are our favourite bands at the moment, because they thought outside the box and added new elements to create something new. The pioneer aspect of things is always what we love to do.”

What can fans expect from Exit Emotions?

Joel: “We’ve been calling ourselves the Backstreet Boys of the metal scene. We are not afraid to take cheesy, boy band-ish melodies and hooks and mix them up with the heaviest breakdowns and electro and rap beats. We want to take that boy band metal thing to the top.”

Niko: “You can hear that we’ve been touring for two-and-a-half years. With our previous albums, we just wrote the songs, and then when the album came out we started to wonder, ‘How are we going to pull this off live?’ We realised that we’re going to be touring a lot, so we wrote these songs with the live shows in mind.”

How do you balance the expectations of heightened success with what you all want to do as artists?

Niko: “Fuck the expectations! Ha ha!”

Joel: “We don’t give a fuck. We’ve had so much hate since the start, you know? So many of those older metalheads said that we are not true metal, which is true! We are the new generation. So I think our skin is so thick right now.”

Niko: “During our career the best things always happened when a lot of people were saying, ‘That’s a bad idea.’ We followed our hearts. You have a lot of people around you telling you how you should do things, but at the end of the day, you’re the only one who can make a decision. We’ve always stayed true to what we are.”

Does the grind get easier or harder as you continue to enjoy success?

Niko: “Harder. You need to challenge yourself to be better, and we’ve always had this ‘nothing is enough’ kind of attitude. We like to think of our careers in trilogies. We’re in the middle of the second trilogy right now.”

Joel: “There’s no such thing as eternal life or an eternal career; it has to end somewhere. So when we know kind of where it ends, it helps us and gives us motivation to write better songs.”

What do you hope to accomplish with the new album?

Niko: “When we started we wanted to do one tour in America, and now we’ve done three. We’ve done one arena show on our own! We’ve also played arenas in Europe, of course as a supporting act, but all the same. The next call is to do headline tours in America.”

Joel: “We’ve been talking about Billboard [the US charts] for 10 years. [Single] Deadzone was our first entry [No.38 on the Mainstream Rock Airplay chart]. But we need to get to the Top 10! There’s still a lot more to achieve. I want to be the biggest Finnish band outside Finland. Right now, probably HIM or Nightwish is the biggest one so far, so the bar is pretty high!”

Blind Channel's Exit Emotions is due March 1 via Century Media