Finnish metal band Fear Of Domination have spent their career threading sharp electronic textures through heavy riffs, never quite sitting still long enough for any single label to stick. On their seventh album they rebuild the whole production path and singer Saku Solin says the finished record lands heavier, wilder, and more ambitious than the band expected going in.
Solin frames the new album as a deliberate reset rather than a simple continuation. The writing itself begins from familiar ground, but the goal is different: to make the full record feel welded together, with fewer loose ends that only show up when you listen back a year later. He describes a long stretch of assembling and reassembling the album over a couple of years, including a period where early singles are already circulating while the band is still figuring out what the complete statement should be.
A key change is the decision to bring in a producer for the entire journey, start to finish. Solin says the band had often handled production in a more piecemeal way before, and that this time they wanted someone with a clear overview who can keep pushing details until the songs truly lock. Producer Jarno Hänninen comes in with a practical mindset: don’t panic-build an album out of parts, but methodically “hit the welds” everywhere they need it, even if it means rewriting, rethinking, and rebuilding sections that would have been left as-is on earlier records.
Musically, he describes the outcome as heavier and darker, but also bigger in scale. Part of that comes from orchestration and layered mass in the arrangements, an approach Solin admits can feel almost excessive while you’re building it. He talks about moments where the band simply lets the instrumentalists commit to the orchestral side of the sound world, trusting that the strange weight they’re adding will make sense once it’s all in place. The end result, he says, is a record that hits harder than their own early expectations.
Solin is also careful about how the band is described from the outside. The “Industrial Metal” tag is something he says follows them around, sometimes more because it’s a convenient shorthand than because it reflects what they’re actually trying to do. He’s not interested in fine-grained genre policing either way. For him the real test is functional: a song has to move physically when it’s supposed to, and if it reaches for melody and atmosphere, it has to earn that space without being treated like a checklist of style markers.
The conversation closes with the idea of an anniversary hovering in the background. Solin notes that marking two decades as a band is something they’ve discussed, but the priority was getting the seventh album finished and out the door. Possible ways to acknowledge the timeline include revisiting early material, even creating new versions of the first record, but he is clear that no concrete plan has been locked yet. For now, the anniversary is more a reminder of how long the project has quietly grown from teenage demos to a band that can afford to rebuild its entire production machinery just to chase a sound it hasn’t had before.
Fear Of Domination interview 14.01.2026
Saku Solin
Producer: Janne Vuorela
https://www.fod.fi/
WinAudioClean: https://github.com/PikkuJanne/WinAudioClean
Picture: Tapio Wilska / FOD
