It is hard to believe that Battle Beast has only been around for a decade. To a fan of the band it feels like they have crammed so much into that decade that they should be making other bands jealous. There have been festival shows and tours with the likes of Nightwish, Sabaton and Kamelot. Now the band marks off another milestone – recording their fifth album. And I am happy to say that No More Hollywood Endings is the most epic we have ever heard these talented Finns.
“It’s very hard to think that this is already our fifth record,” says bass guitarist Eero Sipila when we talk about the band’s career leading up to the new album. “For me it feels like we have just started and then it feels like we have always done this. As a teenager I always thought that I would be in a band that would record forever and we would do twenty albums and tour for forty years, but for me now that is hard to think about because it is such a big number… you just have to write a new album every two years. In our band there are so many different musical inspirations – we have pop-rock, we have power metal – everybody has different musical inspirations and we don’t want to cut any of those out, we want them all to exist and I think that is what lets our sound evolve and let the sons come together naturally.
Sipila burst out laughing when I ask him what the teenage version of him would have thought if someone told him that one day he would be touring with Kamelot. “It would have blown my mind for sure,” he says still laughing. “It is something that you dream of but not something you think will…. you know it was just a dream and you really want it to happen but you never really expect it to happen. Like most people I know have normal jobs at an IT company or they are secretaries or something and what do I do? Yeah I play in a heavy metal band, it is really weird saying that and it is really weird that it has happened.”
No More Hollywood Endings will be released through Nuclear Blast on the 22nd March.
