Finnish alternative metal duo Nocturnal Machines opened their world with Temple, a debut single built from dark rock, electronic weight and concrete-city visual language. The duo of Tommi Suomala and Jussi Turtiainen released the song with a Mari Halttunen-directed video, and followed it in May with “Machine”. In interview singer Tommi Suomala and guitarist, programmer and synth player Jussi Turtiainen tell more.
For a new listener, the band still feels like something in motion. Suomala places it somewhere around alternative metal with a strong machine presence, while Turtiainen talks about music, ideas and visuals forming a world that is not yet fully mapped even for them.
That uncertainty is part of the point. The band has only begun to open itself through the first songs, and both describe the project as something produced and layered, but still meant to feel physical. The aim is not to polish the human element out of it.
The beginning came from Turtiainen’s need to change his working habits. He had been used to writing songs with guitar in a rehearsal room, but this time the material started inside a DAW, by building, arranging and stacking sounds before there was a band around them.
After making early demos he put out a notice on Muusikoiden.net, because the project did not yet have a singer. Suomala answered in February 2025, heard the demos and quickly recorded phone vocal takes that already sounded close to finished. Turtiainen says that was the point where the project clearly moved forward.
For Suomala, Temple was the song that made the connection immediate. He had been away from active band life for several years, but the first riff and atmosphere gave him the feeling that there was something at the center of it worth following.
The two had not known each other before, which makes the early speed of the band slightly unusual. They both describe it less as a planned concept and more as two people arriving at the same place at the same time, with enough shared instinct to trust the first results.
One early decision was to keep Nocturnal Machines as a duo, at least for the first stage. Suomala says it made the process lighter and let them build the working method without too many extra layers. Turtiainen sees the same thing in practical terms: fewer people in the room means fewer delays before the songs can reach a producer.
That does not mean the songs are closed systems. The demos arrive quite far along, but both stress that they are not carved in stone. Once Lauri Hämäläinen enters as producer, mixer and mastering engineer, the material is opened again, with guitars, drums, bass and the overall sound pushed into a more finished shape.
Turtiainen describes his early versions almost as skeletons. They may already contain the structure, atmosphere and main movement, but Suomala’s melodies, voice and lyrics give them a human center. Suomala sees the same process from the other side: he receives a table that is already set, but still has room for the vocal and lyrical identity to define what the song becomes.
The absence of a rehearsal-room phase changes the music. There is no drummer in the corner immediately saying that something will not work live, and no collective weekly grind reshaping the same idea until it becomes something else. Both see that as a freedom, but also as the main risk, because two people can also become blind together.
That is why the outside ear matters. Hämäläinen becomes the person who can challenge a choice without breaking the duo’s own sense of direction. Turtiainen recalls the producer asking whether they wanted to make suboptimal decisions, which was enough to send some guitar parts back to the drawing board.
Temple became the first single partly because it was the clearest entry point. It was the first Nocturnal Machines song Suomala heard, and the first one that began to define the lyrical and visual world around the band. It was also the most complete of the early songs when the release plan started to take shape.
The song’s atmosphere is built around isolation, hopelessness and the need to build an inner safe place that also separates a person from others. Suomala says that world began forming through the song’s own emotional pressure, and the same themes continue through the other early material.
For Turtiainen, Temple felt like the right beginning because it has something cold, concrete and severe in it, but also something strangely cleansing. The band did not want to introduce itself with a performance clip or a neutral rock video. It needed to arrive through a place and an atmosphere.
Lyrics are central to how the band functions. Suomala says he has to be able to stand behind the words and feel that they come from a place he believes in. Sometimes that means writing a first version, realizing later that the song needs something stronger, and rebuilding the whole vocal and lyrical approach.
Turtiainen sees those lyrics as one of the main reasons the project became Nocturnal Machines instead of remaining his own experiment. He describes Suomala’s writing as ambitious and metaphorical, and his singing as raw, open and exposed in a way that changed the meaning of the music around it.
That also makes the visual side easier to imagine. Turtiainen says the texts give the videos and imagery something to touch, even when they do not explain the songs literally. Nocturnal Machines becomes a world made from music, words and images, with each part adding another angle rather than repeating the same statement.
Suomala’s return to band work also gives the project its own personal weight. He left Rain Diary at the end of 2019 after feeling for some time that he and the band were moving in different directions, and describes that decision as difficult but necessary. The pause that followed was not a crisis in itself, but a needed distance before music started calling again.
Looking ahead, both are careful not to promise a fixed shape too early. There is already more material than the first singles, and the band have talked about enough songs for a larger body of work, but they also know the current release reality pushes new bands toward singles.
Turtiainen still thinks like an album person, while Suomala recognizes the same pull toward a fuller statement. At the same time, they do not want to fill a record with weaker songs just to make the format happen. The priority is to keep the quality high enough that every new piece belongs there.
A live version is also somewhere in the future. They do not want Nocturnal Machines to remain only a studio project, but they are not rushing the question of whether that means a full band or session musicians. For now the focus is on releasing songs, building the visual world and making sure the next step still feels like something they both believe in.
Nocturnal Machines interview 09.04.2026
Tommi Suomala & Jussi Turtiainen
Producer: Janne Vuorela
https://www.instagram.com/nocturnalmachines/
Picture: Mari Halttunen / Nocturnal Machines
