Ville Valo: “It’s a continuation of what I’ve done in the past and what might happen next”

Pondering this today from his home in Helsinki – sadly no longer the imposing tower in which he once resided – he still sounds like he expected to feel more grief, more sadness, more something than what he actually did.

“I thought that, since we played together as a band for such a long time, and HIM was and still is such a big part of who I am, that it would feel more like losing a limb or that there would be some sort of, at least psychological, but also maybe a physical change,” he says. “But there was nothing.”

The shows were good, he smiles. He was glad that the band “went out with music”. They’re still friends. The show at Tavastia, he adds, “wasn’t emotional”, but it was “the right way to do it”, even if "maybe we should have ended it a little earlier." Either way, it was clearly time to wrap up. And so, from million-selling global goth metal icon, Ville Valo effectively became an unemployed civilian overnight.

Half a decade on, and nine years since HIM’s last album, 2013’s Tears On Tape swansong, the dark light is beginning to shine again. In March 2020, having spent some post-HIM time doing “Hank Marvin type stuff from my parents’ record collection” with Finnish-language retro troupe Agents, the singer surprise-dropped a three-track EP under the banner VV, entitled Gothica Fennica Vol. 1. Now, having spent two years during COVID locked away in his own studio, playing every instrument himself – “Like the Dark Prince meets Prince” – Ville Valo is making a full return with debut VV album, Neon Noir.

It’s all very Ville. The songs are all cut from a similarly Sabbath-goes-post-punk-with-a-poetry-book cloth as one might be used to, touching on “Kyuss’ Welcome To Sky Valley, but also a lot of post-punk stuff like Siouxsie And The Banshees and Cocteau Twins”. They have stylishly gothic names like Run Away From The Sun, Loveletting and Baby Lacrimarium. When this is put to him, he laughs his charming, self-effacing chuckle and nods, “Yeah, that last one’s the most typically me title anyone could write, isn’t it?”

Having come to the end of the road with HIM, given himself and the world “a bit of a breather, some distance”, apparently you can take the goth out of the metal band…

“Doing this album, and doing it the way I did it, gave me a chance to reflect, in a way, or to have a different perspective of who I am or what I want to do and what I have done and what can be done better, and so forth,” he says, before bursting out laughing again. “Which then ended up being basically doing exactly the same thing I had before.”

Then Ville laughs some more. “So, nothing’s new under the sun.”

God, it’s good to have him back.

Admitting that he “quite enjoys solitude”, the album also provided Ville with an escape during the pandemic. With no deadline, and the boss of his own label that would be putting out the finished product, it was unlike any record of the dozen or so to which he had previously put his name.

“It enabled me to be in a creative space, or a meditative space, for more or less two years,” he says. “I wasn’t thinking about anything else besides the album from the morning until I went to sleep. God bless my girlfriend for her patience. It’s hard to put into words but it was very intense, and it was like a journey into yourself. It makes you relearn what you appreciate, and relearn the little subtleties in music that make the world go around. That make my world go around.”

The darkness of the album is of the romantic stripe with which Ville long ago made his bones, echoing professionally miserable British doom bands like Paradise Lost, Cathedral and My Dying Bride. He jokingly calls it, “an evolutionary tale of what happens when you lock a Finnish musician in a home studio for the entire duration of the pandemic with no sunlight in sight”. But even by Finnish standards of gloom, where the sun is down for almost half the year and the long, freezing winters do their best to kill you, the pandemic still managed to cast its shadow.

“I wouldn’t call it ‘suicidal’, but most of the stuff was written during the pandemic, and there weren’t many rays of sun hitting me,” Ville shares. “Everybody was in the mental gutter. Times were tough. This album was the kind of like the lifebuoy for me. It gave me a reason to wake up every morning and work on something else and try to shut the world outside. When I was working on the music, maybe it was selfish to a certain extent, but also it was a matter of survival.”

In putting this into words Ville, a man who’s written more than one song about the dark side, discovered that his quill was far from dry. Basically about love and darkness? Yes, mainly. But that’s his whole bit.

“It seems that mankind needs a bit of a breather from all this shit, myself included. So I tried to put all that frustration onto paper,” he says. “And if it’s love and darkness, and all sorts of things like that, that’s probably because it’s my vocabulary. Hopefully, the words have been rearranged in a fresh order this time around. But me trying to do something completely different, just because, that doesn’t make any sense to me at all.”

“If people come up and call me an icon or something, I start to blush,” he smiles. “I feel uncomfortable, and I switch bars. When I’m in a situation like that, I do enjoy compliments. But you know, as everybody does, but I’m not too social of a person. I feel awkward in situations like that. I think at the time I just drank my way through it all. That wasn’t good way of handling that – go to the pub, go to [sadly shuttered London drinking den] The Crobar. That saved me and destroyed me at the same time.

“But I’m glad for both, you know, I was burning my candle at both ends,” he continues. “I don’t think I would have done anything different. It would have been maybe good to have somebody tell us, ‘Maybe you should relax for a wee bit.’ And by relaxing, I actually mean relaxing, not to go to the pub and not to write more songs. Just to recharge your batteries, because every rock band burns themselves out at one point or another. But I'm not complaining. And it’s great that I did all those mistakes – I don’t have to make them now.”

‘Now’ for Ville Valo means a new album, and a new tour. Next year, he’ll return to London to perform for the first time since 2017. He’s nervous, but more than that, he’s excited.

“The size of the butterflies in my stomach are gargantuan, something that I never knew existed,” he smiles. “I have, not necessarily high hopes, but I think next year will be a colourful one. It’ll be filled with new experiences.”

And for those wondering about setlists already, “It’s going to be half-and-half new stuff and HIM stuff. It’s not as if we’ll just play Buried Alive By Love as an encore and that’s it.

“It’s a continuation of what I’ve done in the past and, you know, what might happen next,” he says. “Basically I’m just doing exactly what all the rock’n’rollers are doing. The only thing I’m not doing these days is going topless – you know, by that I mean older gentleman behaving like they’re 20 and cool.”

After so long, if not quite in the wilderness, certainly not as visible as he once was, it’s heartening that Ville Valo is the same as ever. Neon Noir does have familiarities, but there’s a personality of its own upon which everything else is built. Most importantly, this is just who he is and what he does. Sex and darkness again, is it? Well, what else is there?

“I’m not very good at planning or doing Plan Bs,” he says. “[After HIM] I wasn’t really thinking about an alternative, because I don’t like studying too much. Not a great student – my patience is nil. Maybe I’d be a roadie or something – I like carrying stuff around. Maybe I’d be doing gardening, that’s kind of the same thing.”

But for now, gardening’s loss is still very much rock’s gain. Although even after all these years, you probably still have to convince Ville that he’s not a blagger and that he’s meant to be here.

“I still consider all the HIM guys to be fanboys in essence,” he finishes. “We started because we loved Sabbath and KISS and Maiden and whatnot. And we still do. We felt like visitors in the in their land, in their realm.

“I kind of still do think that,” he laughs. “I’m stuck in limbo between heaven and hell.”

Neon Noir is due out on January 13 via Heartagram Records, distributed by UMG/ Spinefarm – pre-order the album here. Ville Valo will tour the UK in March 2023.

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• Ville Valo: “Love and sex is at the core of everything”