“I got to the top and felt lost. I had to rebalance. This is my revenge”: How Joel Hokka is resharpening his blade after Blind Channel

There are a couple of comparisons Joel Hokka makes that sum up his current position in the world. Uma Thurman is one. Robbie Williams is another. Both, once you catch his point, make a lot of sense.

The Robbie one is easy. “He basically got booted out of Take That. He was trouble and a problem,” the singer explains. “He figured out his next move, he met [songwriter] Guy Chambers, and they created something that was way bigger than Take That.”

Like Robbie in 1997, last April, Joel announced that, after 12 years and one Finnish Eurovision representation as co-frontman, he wasn’t a member of Blind Channel anymore. Unlike Take That, the rest of the band announced that they weren’t either, and broke up. Almost a year to the day since, this Friday Joel releases Via Miseria IV, his debut album under his own name, as HOKKA. With its samurai-ish artwork and videos, and the man’s description as “my revenge”, this is where Uma Thurman comes in.

“You know how Kill Bill starts, where Uma Thurman’s in hospital all beaten up? They tried to kill her,” he says. “But then she was like, ‘I’m gonna get the power back and rebuild myself, brick by brick, get back to the top and kill everyone.’ I think that I’ve been mistreated by myself and from the others in the past. It’s time to fix that. It’s time to be the hero that I needed when I was younger.”

On a sunny day in Helsinki, we join Joel in his apartment in an upmarket part of the city. Sporting a Justin Bieber shirt and noting that he’s still feeling the effects of a weekend party, he nevertheless buzzes with an intense, ambitious energy. He might not quite be starting from the bottom, but he is in somewhat blind territory as he goes it alone, but that’s how he likes it.

He agrees that he’s got all this together, alongside former Rasmus guitarist Pauli Rantasalmi, in double-quick time, but, again, he’s rather enjoying it. His debut show at the legendary Tavastia club in his home city is almost sold out, there’s a load of festivals in the diary, and singles from the album have already breezed past half a million.

“I'm in a rollercoaster right now,” he beams, “but I love it. It's awesome!”

Blind Channel were a rollercoaster as well, but one Joel had become less and less thrilled by. After forming in 2013 in Oulu, in the far north of Finland, in 2021 they found themselves as ambassadors for their country at the Eurovision Song Contest. They didn’t win, but that didn’t matter. Blind Channel became massive anyway. What followed was “basically four years on tour”.

“The whole era from 2021 to 2024, it’s so chaotic in my head,” Joel recalls. “I don’t really remember what happened. I just remember that suddenly it took off fucking big. And then the ride just became airports, buses, airports, backstages, interviews. It was this never-ending craziness that I was just a passenger in.

“You found a band with your own hands. You build it up, and you go to Eurovision, and you stream 250 million, and you are basically the biggest Finnish rock export for years. Then when you’re there on the top, you burn out. You feel fucking lost. You start to feel like, ‘Is this fun anymore?’”

Part of the trouble came when he had to “slow down and be a human again, because that’s when the trouble comes in.” He also began to doubt his role in the band, as a creative, a songwriter. Without any time to properly get deep into the process, he says there was “no room for me to write anything” when they convened to create. At what should have been dream studio sessions in LA, in Helsinki, in Berlin, at Abbey Road in London, Joel felt “like a non-playable character”.

“We were in Abbey Road Studios in London, where the biggest bands ever made the best albums ever, working with the fucking biggest names ever, and I wasn't able to contribute. I was just scrolling TikTok like, ‘I’m gonna go to the nearest pub and drink beer and be miserable.’”

He did that in Helsinki as well, today admitting that he spent weeks at the bar telling anyone who would listen that he was planning to quit. It was, he says, probably the act of someone who wanted it to inevitably get back to his bandmates, so they’d “tell me to fuck off”, and make the whole thing easier.

Called to a meeting with their manager like a schoolboy to the headmaster one afternoon, he arrived a member of Blind Channel and left as a free agent.

“I felt more free than ever, but at the same time, it felt more alone than ever. But for some fucking freak reason I loved it. It made me feel alive, and it still does.”

Though walking out on a band like Blind Channel might seem like the height of foolishness, you can understand the gilded cage Joel felt as well. You also wouldn’t bet against him too quickly. Joel is a man with ambitions that enter the room before he does. As well as a singer, he’s also one of Finnish radio’s top rock DJs (not an intentional Robbie Williams gag).

It also becomes clear that music is part of who he is. In this, he did quite well growing up in Oulu, with a strong metal scene based around the legendary Sentenced (imagine a more radio-friendly Type O Negative, with an even more dour sense of humour, evidenced in songs like Excuse Me While I Kill Myself). As well as being where the action was, there was an outlet in it, something young Joel had previously expressed through drawing.

“I've always had this pain inside of me, and I felt like there wasn't any place to put it out – there was no outlet for the pain and the anxiety, other than drawing pictures,” he says. “The band thing was fun because you had friends.”

As he gathered his thoughts post-Blind Channel, “I realised I’ve got so much shit in my system, and I needed to get it out.”

First of all he had an idea of a sort of Johnny Cash-type thing. This, he was told, was shit. When he and Pauli began to write the gothy, dark, very Finnish-sounding material that would make up the album, he found his creative mojo again. He’d given himself a massive load of work, especially with his name above the door, but he says that, “Last summer was one of the best periods of my life, because I had so much fun creating this album.”

One standout is Heart Said No, a song where Joel feels like “I am really reflecting who I am as a person”. Like his townsmen in Sentenced, it has a feeling of taking a bath in the melancholy, and rather enjoying just wallowing.

“I really believe that I live in this world called melancholy, because I love everything that is kind of sad and rainy and dark and gloomy and all that,” he chuckles. “It's weird that I always go back there. I always go back to the melancholic, and I just wanted to be super-open about that. Me and Pauli wanted to capture the Finnish soul and landscape in one song.”

At the other end of this, Joel wants HOKKA to be over the top, a wild place where no idea is too big. He points to a cape hanging on the wall behind him, used onstage and in video, and how “I want to bring out that comic book, Batman thing, to be my own superhero.”

An illustration: his first TV appearance, and one of their first performances ever, on New Year’s Eve, basically Finland’s Hootenanny. There, Joel felt like he was back at Eurovision. As he waited in the wings, he paced in a circle, “Just going, ‘What the fuck am I doing?’” Then the assistants put his cape on. “I was like, ‘It’s time to be Batman.’”

Some people, he admits, find him a bit too much. But, he reasons, they said the same about Ozzy. “I guess many artists are maniacs, crazy.” He’s ambitious, he agrees, but he’s also a dreamer, “Like a child.” Turning into a melancholic rock superhero is just what he feels like.

“We’ve got one life and we're going to be dead one day. So why not?” he shrugs. “I want to do all this like this, with my own name and my face and my wildest dreams and visions and red capes and superheroes and everything. Life is too short to just hammer the same nail all the time.”

As he starts his new chapter, Joel admits he’s had to grow a lot. He’s enjoying being “a bit humbled” by playing in clubs again rather than at Finland’s massive Nokia Arena (one day, by the way, and Wembley), because he’s had to do some maturing to get back in the saddle.

“I had to rebalance,” he admits. “Now I feel like I'm an adult. I'm taking care of my taxes, and I'm taking care of my health and sleep, and I've finally grown up just a bit. I'm not fully grown up, but I feel like I'm getting there.

“I wasn't doing that when I was in a band. I was just blaming everyone else for everything, and I was this 29-year-old teenager that someone should take care of. But now I see that's toxic as hell. This is a good way to grow up.”

As for what had to end for this to start, Joel would “recommend this to everyone in the world”. The revenge of which he speaks is also a thing of love, he insists, an expression of his determination not to be defeated by circumstance, or others, or life itself.

”If you feel like you're stuck in a marriage, or a job, or anything in your life, just break free. Do something crazy. You're gonna be dead eventually. So just fuck it. Go for it.

“I have nothing bad against the guys in Blind Channel, but I felt like I was in the golden goose. I needed to get out. I needed to fly free and take a risk. You take the wildest card ever, it turns out to be your best ride. I'm just hoping for the best. And so far, it looks good.

“I'm the luckiest motherfucker on Earth right now.”

Via Miseria IV is released on April 24 via Nuclear Blast.

Read this next:

• “I was on my own. It became a powerful moment of growth”: Inside Joel Hokka’s new band, HOKKA
• “The cops caught me on a stolen snowmobile”: 13 Questions with Blind Channel’s Joel Hokka
  
• Blind Channel: “In Finland you’re told not to follow your dream – we want to be the biggest band in the world”