Sunniva are a Turku band dealing in slow, crushing heaviness. After years of demos, EPs and side projects, the group arrived with a patient, long-brewed debut album Hypostasis. In interview Oliver, Jaakko and Tuomas tell more.
Their story grows out of shared shifts and late-night jams. Oliver and Jaakko met at work in Turku, found out they were into the same kind of music and started jamming as a guitar-and-drums duo, letting ideas just roll. Friends drifted in and out with the current four-piece slowly locked into place, all of them at some point colleagues in the same workplace, all already familiar faces from local punk and metal shows. That long pre-history explains why Hypostasis sounds less like a debut and more like a band arriving fully formed.
The music moves at a different speed. Sunniva write together in the rehearsal room, with Oliver and bassist Timi often bringing in the first riffs and everyone else shaping dynamics and space. Tuomas talks about thinking in ”drama curves”, when to pull intensity down, when to let it boil over, while also being ready to not play at all if the song needs air.
That weight carries a set of themes. Mercurial Bloodstreams grew from anxiety about runaway technological progress and constant surveillance, the way we all slid behind screens during the pandemic and never really came back. The song’s stubborn, mechanical pulse reflects that unease, a push that feels like being carried forward faster than you’d like. Valovaltimo, by contrast, brings in Finnish and Swedish yrics, rooted in Oliver’s dream of floating in a void among strange animals, half terrifying and half calming. The band see language as just another tool, if English, Finnish and Swedish all live around the group, there is no reason to choose just one. Multi-lingual lyrics simply match the emotional and musical range they’re aiming for.
For now, Hypostasis marks the end of one long phase and the quiet beginning of the next. Many of its songs reach back to ideas first sketched before 2020, then rewritten and reworked until the record finally came together and found a home with Svart Records. Around it all, Sunniva kept busy, live soundtrack work, streamed sessions, an ever-deepening connection to Turku’s underground where friends’ bands, small venues and free outdoor shows keep things alive despite the usual venue closures. New riffs and concepts are already simmering in the practice room, but there is no rush. Like the band’s own slow-moving sea imagery, whatever comes next will rise in its own time.
Sunniva interview 04.12.2025
Oliver Webb, Jaakko Ojanperä, and Tuomas Mikola
Producer: Janne Vuorela
https://www.instagram.com/sunnivadoom/
Picture: Aleks Talve / Sunniva
