Finnish symphonic metal force Brymir are back with What We Leave Behind, their latest full-length and one of their darkest and most emotionally charged releases to date. Blending crushing metal, epic orchestration and cinematic atmospheres, the album explores existential dread, grief, environmental anxiety and the darker side of humanity while still leaving room for melody, hope and even a touch of humour. We caught up with Jarkko Niemi (bass, backing vocals, lyrics and additional songwriting) to talk about the creative process behind What We Leave Behind, mythology, grief, pacifism, environmental concerns, the influence of film music and J.S. Bach, and, of course, the rather unexpected presence of Scooter's How Much Is the Fish? on such a dark album.
M.I. - What We Leave Behind is described as your darkest and most sinister album so far. Was this darker atmosphere something you consciously wanted to pursue when you started working on the record, or did it emerge naturally from the themes you were exploring?
The outset for every song is the writer’s feeling, the mood, as it is written... We didn’t really have any kind of plan beforehand what “type” of album we’d be making next after Voices In The Sky, it all comes down to the things roiling in our heads as the songs are formed. Like we’ve stated in the promotional materials, the overall mood in the world hasn’t gotten that much lighter in these past four years since the previous record, so naturally the album reflects that. But, at the same time, some of these songs deal with extremely personal, concrete things that have happened, and those songs have the rawest kind of darkness to them... Guess we were all going through dark things, in our heads and in the world at large, as we were writing this stuff.
M.I. - The album deals extensively with existential dread, humanity’s self-destructive tendencies and the idea that “Midgard lies in flames.” Was there a particular moment or development in the world around you that made these themes feel especially urgent while writing the album?
It’s really hard to pinpoint a specific event somewhere, since the doom and gloom seems to be pervasive wherever you look around the world. War, A.I., rising demagogues... The world seems to be going to hell no matter how and where you look. I don’t think there was an urgency necessarily, but definitely a need to vomit out these bad feelings, to scream into the void so to speak, since these dark developments are so pervasive.
M.I. - You use Norse mythology throughout the album, but the messages are clearly aimed at the modern world. Why does mythology provide such an effective framework for addressing contemporary issues?
I guess the use of mythological language isn’t so strange if you consider the fact that even the original big mythologies were stories that people told to address the world, society etc. as it was at the moment... It’s more of a shared language of symbols and images that you use in poetry. As a music genre, metal sounds BIG, it’s HUGE, so you want to use fitting language that’s equally grandiose. Interestingly enough, the use of this kind of symbolic imagery makes it also kind of easier to share very concrete, personal stories with the audience; it can translate a very specific thing in the writer’s headspace to relate to a completely different equally specific thing in the listener’s mind – you can make something shareable that by all accounts should be almost impossible to share... And you can talk about things that you wouldn’t dream of speaking in public, with full emotional weight and conviction – a safe mask if you will.
M.I. - One of the strongest ideas on the album is that, regardless of belief system, no god or ideology is worth dying for at the hands of humanity. Is What We Leave Behind ultimately a pacifist album, and was that message something you wanted listeners to take away from it?
There are definitely elements of pacifism in there, because in an ideal world nobody would need to die for any kind of ideology. But humans are humans, with terrible tendencies to justify horrible things using any kind of favourable straw-man, and as a social species we desire to forms teams and clans that are defined by the other, by opposition. And, since you know the other players will play it dirty, to survive you’ll have to play dirty too. It’s hard to take this information and then seriously convey a message of “guys, just don’t do that please” ... I guess the message is ultimately a lament in that we’re doomed to fail at pacifism and life in general, but the very necessary attempt to leave the world a bit better than you found it is the true value; even if you know that it may be pointless, you have to try your best, try something.
M.I. - True Darkness is particularly interesting in the way it follows the stages of grief, even withholding a traditionally sung chorus and ending with hopeful clean vocals. How did you approach translating such an emotional progression into the music?
The song stems from Joona’s very dark personal moments, moments that did require going through those very specific steps. It was a song Joona wrote the music to in 2023, but could write the lyrics only in 2025 - the experience was too raw to put into words first. The song has such a weight behind it that thinking about any kind of pop-song-structures never even occurred; it just had to be made. The hopeful clean vocals at the end were actually Viktor’s idea during the production, and those clean-sung lyrics are his contribution; he had to give something to console a friend in that song, to let him know that it’s going all right... Very powerful stuff that didn’t, that really couldn’t have any kind of conscious approach of “this is how we’ll do it”.
M.I. - Viktor, your work as a movie sound designer has clearly influenced Brymir’s cinematic approach. Has your professional work changed the way you compose for the band, particularly when it comes to atmosphere, soundscapes and the use of choirs and orchestration?
Viktor: Work in film sound design have definitely shaped my songwriting, sharpening this ability to tell stories through sound. Even in lyric-driven tracks, I can weave sound design between the music and words to amplify the message I’m after. Usually, I know right from the start which synths or orchestral elements a song needs; I often begin the whole process by jamming and programming MIDI in my music software. This can result in that the song is sometimes highly developed before I add any vocals, choirs or band instruments. But equally true is that sometimes it goes in the opposite, I start playing around with synths or orchestrations and quickly notice that what I’m writing would be great with maybe just a guitar, with few or almost no orchestrations or other “spices”!
M.I. - There are several instrumental or quieter moments on the album, such as Slaying Star and Moment of Silence, which create breathing space between the heavier songs. Do you think those moments are becoming increasingly important to Brymir’s songwriting?
There’s long been a cinematic side to Brymir, we’re no strangers to long orchestral intros before blasting off into some speedy melodic death metal. Those kinds of things are crucial if you approach our songs in a long-form album format: you have to have variation and nuance to make the heavy-hitting parts hit as heavy as they need to... If it’s full blast all the time you get numb to it pretty fast. However, the way the album came together was still a kind of happy accident: we never write songs with any kind of overarching, set-in-stone narrative or concept in mind, all the songs have been composed as individuals, pure and simple, just in their own bubble. Is it a pat-yourself-on-the-back situation to say we’ve gotten pretty good at figuring out what song should follow the other? And Viktor’s experience in film-sound definitely helps in smoothing out all transitions from one mood to the next... It’s about having versatile material at hand in the first place, and then knowing how to put it in order and where to “make the cuts”. Of course, the situation is different if you want to approach the songs individually; it’s set up so that both approaches work fine: you can “get to the song proper” fast if you want, or you can let the thing flow as a whole if that’s your thing.
M.I. - Sleipnir, Tempestbound and The Roaring King approach the album’s themes from very different musical angles. When writing, do you generally begin with a musical idea and find the lyrical concept afterwards, or can a lyrical theme dictate the music from the beginning?
A song starts out with the first musical idea, but what it’s going to be about lyrically might be the very next thing that comes to mind immediately afterwards... It varies wildly from song to song. But it is extremely rare for us to have the lyrical theme come first... Maybe the only thing I can think of from that angle is the J.S. Bach tribute; it had a clear pious base-text that we wanted to invert from the get-go. Oh, Joona’s song, of course... That’s definitely where the “text” dictated the music from the start, though the words were too painful to put to actual paper for a long time after the musical composition.
M.I. - Thy Self The Highest Love draws inspiration from Johann Sebastian Bach and leads into The Roaring King. What attracted you to Bach specifically, and what did you want to bring from his music into the Brymir universe?
Viktor’s childhood had chamber music surroundings, his mother is a concert flute-player by trade; so Bach is something that he has very strongly at the roots of his musical consciousness as it developed. It had long been an ambition to render something from the o.g. J.S. through a Brymir-lens, and now we just chose to get it done. A very interesting and fun challenge as a lyricist to reword something so very pious purposefully into something selfish and grotesque, from Apollonian to Dionysian, yet hold onto the grandness of the language. A fun little perversion there, that really amplifies the brutal story we wanted to tell with the pair of songs.
M.I. - Your previous album, Voices in the Sky, already addressed environmental issues through Herald of Aegir. With the new album taking an even broader look at humanity and society, do you see Brymir increasingly becoming a vehicle for expressing your concerns about the world around you?
You write from what is in your heart... We’ve noticed that if a song doesn’t resonate on a personal level, they usually don’t leave the drawing-board. That’s why there hasn’t really been a purely fantastical story behind any song after our very first demo. Existential and environmental angst has been one of the themes we’ve written about from the very beginning (Breathe Fire To The Sun... now there’s some symbolism there, right?), and I guess it just comes to us naturally. We’re people who care about this kind of stuff and try our best to not become completely cynical... What else can you do?
M.I. - And finally, you somehow transformed Scooter’s How Much Is the Fish? into a melodic death metal song. What made you decide that this particular Eurodance classic deserved the Brymir treatment and how seriously should we take the salmon plushies that have become part of your live shows?
It’s a very fitting song from a couple of angles... In the band, we’re of the age that Eurodance of the ever-hopeful nineties was at its peak when we were the most “vulnerable”, so it’s equally honest for us to do this song as it was to cover Dark Funeral on the previous record, considering our musical “upbringing”. Viktor had been thinking of doing a metal cover of How Much Is the Fish? for a couple of years already; when the label loved the idea, it was only two days and the song was basically done. It’s also very fitting from the previously mentioned environmental angle: Herald of Aegir had accidentally birthed this whole fish-metal thing from the previous album, the first plushie we got as a gift from friends and fans before a show in Amsterdam, we decided to throw it out to “jump” in the pit, and thus the meme was birthed and then it grew, and grew, and grew... You can’t take that fish-thing any further than this now, can you? We planned for none of this, but it’s become a fun thing to share with our audience. The live shows have this wonderfully dichotomic thing to them... We play very fast, hard-hitting metal with very serious, raw and personal song-topics, there’s like that one side of catharsis through rage and sadness, but then at the same time there’s room for the other side; being silly together, letting that angst go in a blur of movement and the dumbest jokes... A second catharsis through joy. Both tears and laughter, equally valid. It’s very special. Thus, on the album, the Scooter cover comes perfectly right after the last Brymir-song ends in the most absolutely depressing and hopeless imagery there is on the album... You can stay and wallow there in the depths if you feel like it, but if you desire a little “mint-refresher” afterwards to help you get on with your day, that’s there too!
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Questions by Sónia Fonseca
