Back in 1999, when Tuomas Saukkonen felt the need to break his routines as a drummer of a local band, his new metal project called BEFORE THE DAWN was born. As soon as the studio was booked, the following demo session started a decade that brought 3 demos, 5 full length albums, 1 DVD and 2 mini albums. BEFORE THE DAWN also hit both single and album charts in the bands home country Finland many times. Their 6th album “Deathstar Rising” will be released on 25 February via Nuclear Blast.

Some weeks ago I had a nice long chat with Tuomas, in fact, instead of the allowed 30 minutes we talked about an hour… but there were too many interesting things to talk about, and it seemed the time flew with wings…

Hi Thomas, and welcome to Metal Shock! How things are going?

Thank you, Tarja, they’re going very good! There are plenty of so-called “good-alike-hurry”.

Can you tell us a brief description of who you are, that is, Before the Dawn members and their roles in the band?

As a Band, we’re about 12 years old, 4-piece Finnish heavy metal band. The project started as my solo project, but over the years new members jumped in. Our solo guitarist Juho Räihä is also our sound engineer, who recorded and mixed the latest album “Deathstar Rising”.  I produced it, and I play guitar and I’m the lead singer. You know, while recording the album there were no “outsiders” there in the studio, but we handled everything by ourselves. Norwegian-Finnish Lars Eikind is our bassist / vocalist and has also done a lot of studio work. This completely “self-made” -pattern became gradually as our normal way to do, also because I’ve done for years everything by myself, as well as Juho has done these things for a long time. So, the work in the studio is going well and smoothly, as all of us can work in a professional way, so the result is the best possible, just the way we want, and quickly. Just think that the recordings went all in under two weeks’ time, plus mixing, but the time we spent in all for this album, were three and a half weeks, 8-10 hours a day, and the whole album was ready. After all, this is our sixth album, so we’ve practiced well and we’ve cut off the so-called useless mess.
Our fourth member is Atte Palokangas, he has been our session drummer for two years (and well over 100 gigs). To all of us it was already clear that Atte will stay in the band, but for some reasons his status was still “open”, so when we realized that he hadn’t yet been made permanent, we wanted to fix the situation right before entering the studio 🙂
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