Finnish melodic death metal band Bloody Falls return with IV, their fourth full-length record, pushing their blend of melodic death, black metal and groove metal into its most aggressive and focused form so far. In interview guitarist Stavros Mathios and singer Antero Hakala tell more.
For Mathios, Bloody Falls right now is still defined by a fusion of those three elements, but with a clearer center than before. He describes IV as the band’s best album, not only because of individual songs, but because the record clicks from beginning to end in a way earlier releases maybe did not. Hakala hears the same thing from a slightly different angle. The album is still versatile, but the songs feel more connected to each other, and that has also made it harder for the members to agree on one favorite track. Everyone seems to land somewhere else, which in this case says something useful about the strength of the whole package.
The band’s story also gives the moment its own weight. Mathios moved from Greece to Finland at 21 with the goal of forming a metal band, but he does not see the first years of Bloody Falls as the final version of what the band would become. The period from 2017 to 2019 was more like a trial stage, with the group still looking for its own language. In his mind, the more real start came around Burn the Witch, when the current shape of the band began to lock in and the writing became more focused. That distance is clear when he looks back at Thanatos album, where the material moved through several directions, tunings and metal styles before the band understood what should stay.
The previous album Amartia remains important to them. Mathios calls it the band’s biggest success and says it opened doors, but he also hears it as a record where the group experimented with pressure, mid-tempo weight and a more constant sense of tension. Songs like “Sorrow Is My Name” and “I Met My Death” became signals for what Bloody Falls could carry forward. With IV, those lessons return in a sharper form. The groove is still there, and the darker melodic side becomes especially clear in “Black Death,” but the band were less interested in slow passages or wide stylistic jumps. Hakala says the goal was to keep the core elements alive without making the album feel like a collection where one track suddenly becomes thrash metal and another one becomes black metal just for contrast.
The aggression came almost by itself. Mathios says it was not written from personal anger, and that his own life has been happy in recent years, but once the first riffs appeared the record kept moving in that direction. Instead of trying to soften it, the band accepted that they had a full album of direct, heavy and groovy material in front of them.
The number four became central through “The Four.” The song began from old riffs by guitarist Marko Mäkinen, which Mathios reshaped into a new structure before writing lyrics around the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Once the band realized it was the fourth song on their fourth album, IV became the natural title, even if the original plan to release “The Four” as the fourth single fell apart because of production timing.
The opening song “By My Own Grave” was chosen because it gave the band a similar energy to “Sorrow Is My Name” on Amartia. Mathios says it had the right groove and sense of movement to introduce the record, and although it was considered as a single, the band decided the opening track would naturally get attention once listeners pressed play. For Hakala, the lyrics of “By My Own Grave” come from personal struggle, though not in a literal one-to-one way. “Pestilence Is All I Need” was also considered for the opening slot, but the band felt it arrived too immediately and too violently. “By My Own Grave” gave the album a more controlled first step before the full attack opened.
“Mother, Your Son Is Bleeding” came from a single line that appeared to Mathios while he was at work. The title stayed with him, and from there the song grew into one of the album’s darkest pieces, written around stories of abuse, neglect and the psychological damage that can sit behind a person’s surface. He does not describe it as the story of one specific person, but as a collection of things heard over the years in Greece, Finland and elsewhere. The song arrived late in the album process, but Hakala remembers the band reacting quickly once it appeared. Something had to be dropped so that “Mother, Your Son Is Bleeding” could be included, and it soon became one of the singles.
“I Am the Devil” was the first single because it gave the clearest full picture of the album. Mathios says it has the attack, the groove, the melodic chorus and the more accessible side of the band in one place. Hakala sees it as probably the easiest song on the record to enter, still aggressive and fast, but direct enough.
Not every song was easy to finish. “Black Death” was difficult for the guitars because of its details and small variations, while Hakala first expected “The Churn” to be the vocal problem because of its dense lyric load. In the end, both point to “Enter the Mourn” as the real nightmare, a song that sounded simple on paper but kept throwing the band off through its feel and timing. Mathios says even the mixing side had to fight with it.
Bloody Falls interview 17.06.2026
Stavros Mathios & Antero Hakala
Producer: Janne Vuorela
https://www.instagram.com/bloodyfallsofficial/
Picture: Kai Lukander / Bloody Falls
