Music | Kyyria was on the verge of an international breakthrough when its members heard from a TV show that it had broken up – Now the band made a comeback

In autumn In 1998, the Helsinki band Kyyria was breaking through.

The third album of the quintet playing experimental crossover metal Inner Wellness rose to number 22 on Finland’s official album chart, and the band’s gigs were thronged all over Finland.

It was a great achievement from a band that didn’t represent any clear genre. In the late 1990s, there were few, if any, metal bands in Finland that combined heavy nu metal guitars and atmospheric synth melodies, and whose music appealed equally to all genders.

Kyyria also aroused interest abroad: the band’s German label Gun Records flew its protégé to San Francisco to record Inner Wellness and made an album of the first single Jesus from Döner big budget music video.

It seemed that Kyyria could become Finland’s next export metal hope after Amorphis and Waltar.

Then Kyyria broke up.

No reasons were ever given for the termination, and the band members moved on to play with Him, Amorphis and Suburban Tribe.

What happened?

Already his first album By Blessed Ravings (1995) Kyyria had a clear goal. It wanted to break abroad.

“Nowadays, if you succeed in Finland, you can be satisfied. But in the 1990s, there was a completely different mentality. Getting stuck in Finland was terrible, and the main focus was to get abroad. It was our generation’s thing,” Kyyria’s keyboard player Santeri “Sande” Kallio says at a table in a Helsinki rock bar.

In principle, Kyyria had all the conditions to succeed. It was different enough to stand out from the crowd, yet commercial enough to appeal to larger audiences.

The dynamics of the band were taken care of by members from completely different backgrounds: Sande Kallio was a techno guy, drummer Mika Karppinen punk and guitarist Mikael Vehkaoja prog metal lover. Soloist Ville Tuomi brought rap and personal singing style to the band, bassist Niclas Etelävuori funk metal take.

Another his album Alien’s (1997) the members of Kyyria themselves began to believe that a breakthrough could be close.

Alien made in Germany by an award-winning metal producer Siggi Bemmin with, and it was distributed in Germany, Switzerland and Austria in addition to Finland. The record company promised Kyyria big tours and booked the warm-up for the American crossover band Biohazard’s German tour.

In the end, the plans remained just words. One tour after another was cancelled, and eventually the Biohazard pest also fell due to visa problems. A few funny Germany gigs remained.

“When the Biohazard cancellation came, the record company called to say it’s okay, now the Faith No More tour is coming, you can warm up. I was like heh heh”, guitarist and founder of Kyyria Mikael Vehkaoja says.

“We were promised something all the time, but I just sat there in awe. Those adversities began to frustrate me with care.”

The third Inner Wellness around the time of the album (1998), the gaps between the members of Kyyria started to fall apart. The band was no longer a tight community that went to a bar together after a gig or practice.

Disagreements were accentuated during the recording of the album in San Francisco, when the band’s money ran out, the studio days became long and hard, and to top it all off, the album’s producer suffered a burnout in the middle of the recording and was lost for three days.

When Kyyria returned to Finland and was about to start promoting her upcoming album, the record company Gun Records dropped a bombshell: Kyyria would be fired. The album would be released, but it would no longer be marketed and no tour would be organized.

The dismissals were justified by the record company’s organizational reform. The more likely reason was that Kyyria did not achieve the company’s sales goals quickly enough. Gun Records had also recently added another Finnish band to its roster, where it saw more potential: Himi’s debut album Greatest Lovesongs Vol. 666 published in Germany in August 1998.

“Those firings were quite a crushing blow. They came at the worst possible time, because we had invested in the band full-time for many years, and made what we think is our best album,” says Mikael Vehkaoja.

“At the time, it seemed like an impossible idea to start looking for a new record company and build everything from scratch.”

Anxiety in the middle, Kyyria resorted to dark humor and started joking about breaking up the band – after all, a broken up band always got some popularity.

The joke wasn’t completely off the cuff. The members of Kyria began to be tired of empty promises and lost opportunities. In addition, the band was frustrated that around the same time many other Finnish bands, from The Rasmus to Apocalyptica, started gaining a foothold abroad.

“We spent half of our youth working to get out into the world. It felt like the band just wouldn’t go through,” says Kallio.

In late autumn 1998, Mikael Vehkaoja’s landline phone rang.

On the other end of the phone was a reporter from Radio Mafia, who inquired if Vehkaoja would like to comment on Kyyria’s breakup.

Huh, what is this, Vehkaoja was amazed.

It turned out that the singer Ville Tuomi had roared in the tram Steep-to the editor of the youth program that Kyyria has broken up. On the next day Steep announced the matter in his live TV broadcast.

After hearing the news, Kyyria gathered at the training camp and started brainstorming what to do about the situation.

“If there had been even one person in the band who would have been furiously opposed to the idea, we wouldn’t necessarily have broken up. But at that moment that type was not there,” says Kallio.

One or two a week after the breakup, Kallio’s phone rang. It turned out exactly as the band had joked: the band was offered a lucrative seven-gig tour in Germany.

Kyyria decided to take the offer, and in January 1999 it played its last tour. Everyone had a good time and the band literally played like it was the last day.

During the entire tour, not a word was spoken about canceling the breakup.

“There was all kinds of stubbornness, self-pity, bitterness and ego, which we didn’t know how to deal with,” says Vehkaoja.

“It was a bit like being in a long relationship,” Kallio continues. “At some point, the right words should be said so that things would continue. But you don’t say them.”

25 years after their breakup, Kyyria finally decided to put the cat on the table and get back together, even for a while.

Over the course of the summer, the band has played a few gigs. The return culminates at the weekend with two sold-out Tavastian gigs. After that, Kyyria’s story is over, at least for now.

Sande Kallio was the most active driver of the band’s return. In his opinion, Kyyria’s songs are so good that not making a comeback would have been madness.

“I thought that this is an absolution for us as a band. If we do this, all bitterness, negativity and disappointment will go away. And that’s what happened,” he says.

For the longest time, Vehkaoja opposed Kyyria’s return. He was afraid to face the feelings of failure that the band and especially its final period once evoked.

“Maybe I was a coward. I wanted to shut it down,” he says.

When Kyyria started training for the summer gigs last fall, Vehkaoja was completely lost.

“It was really tough mentally when all the memories came back to mind. I realized I haven’t covered it. On some level, this return has also been an integration project for me. It has been therapeutic and surprising to see how many people have been waiting for this.”

Kyyria will perform at Tavastia on August 18 and 19, 2023.