INTERVIEW WITH LOTTA RAUTIAINEN BY ISABELLA AMBROSIO
“If you can believe my parents, they said that I sang before I spoke,” Rautiainen explains with a small, but reserved smile, “So, I’ve always enjoyed singing and performing.”
Luna Kills’ Lotta Rautiainen’s singing sounds like it’s been wrapped in silk, a jazzy full-bodied tone that bellows and bewitches with precision and authority, embodying that composed nature that is so apparent about Rautiainen.
It’s an interesting juxtaposition to the fury of nu-metal that envelops her sound. It feels like it shouldn’t work, but it does as soon as she shifts from those enchanting melodies into guttural screams that cause fission. Rautiainen confides that she has always “loved rock and metal music,” and that it wasn’t an intentional decision to pursue a jazz style within her singing. It was simply due to “all of [her] singing teachers” and their fondness of “jazz, and they liked older songs.”
Despite that being her introduction to singing, and while Finland is known for its metal scene, her small city didn’t quite have the capability to support budding musicians as well as others in Finland, she found a way. “We do have really good youth programs here in Kuopio, where we live at the moment, but the scene is a little bit better in some other cities. It depended on what school you were in. it comes to that.” So, with no community, she journeyed solitarily through the world of music. “When you don’t have a band, you have to start on your own somewhere.”
On her own, as she grew older, her voice and identity developed as a vocalist, and she joined forces with her cousin, who subsequently became the guitarist of Luna Kills, Samuli Paasineva. Together, they began crafting the bones and structure of the band, carving out their own sonic identities in the process. “If I wouldn’t have started the band with my cousin, I don’t think I would have [ever joined] bands or anything like that. It was partly luck.”
Rautiainen explains that she had begun writing songs at seven years old, “I thought I had to be doing it wrong because it felt so easy to me. I gaslighted myself for many years because I thought that I must be shit,” when in fact, that couldn’t be further from the truth. “I was actually really small when I started writing lyrics and doing my own songs. I never had anything concrete written on a piece of paper regarding chord progressions or anything like that,” is beyond luck. That’s fate in motion.
When she started playing with her cousin, fate = had to sit back and watch it all unfold. “I dabbled a little bit [in songwriting] when I was in my teens, but when the band started, it started all over again. Then I wasn’t gaslighting myself anymore.” Completed by Jimi Jinnunen on drums and Lassi Peltonen on bass, Luna Kills’ cosmic future burned bright.
Partly due to the fact that Rautiainen lays her heart in each and every song, talking about her feelings within music isn’t difficult. “It’s a form of therapy to me, almost. It’s a really natural way for me to revisit those feelings, events, and everything that has happened to me.” Rautiainen briefly mentions trouble in school with bullying, “I was bullied at school. So, songwriting was a way for me to visit those situations and try to make sense of everything I was feeling. It started from there, and it has always been with me.”
It’s almost like songwriting replaced Rautiainen’s native tongue of Finnish, bypassing English, and becoming the one language that she felt most comfortable speaking, as a young child or as an adult now. “It’s harder to talk about it because then I have to put everything into words. That’s the part that’s really difficult. Songwriting almost makes it feel not so personal because you’re sharing it with so many people, and everybody is taking away something that is personal to them or struggles that they have had. So, it almost feels like a shared experience.”
Using songwriting as therapy allows for some darker material than most, as expected. “I tend to write really rough lyrics and really raw things,” she reflects. “Those things are really hard to talk about because I don’t want to burden anyone else with my own struggles. I almost feel like it’s really disrespectful to bear everything to everybody else. But through music, it’s not that difficult for me.” In combination with the aspect of her lyrics becoming a shared experience, it becomes a vessel for others to invest their emotions and feelings into without necessarily needing to articulate it.
“In the context of music, I really need to feel the lyrics I’m writing,” which doesn’t differ from the average listener. Rautiainen explains, “I really need to feel everything so I can convey the emotions properly inside the music and when I’m on stage. It has been with me throughout my life, and it has always been a way for me to make sense of my own life and own experiences.”
The result? An industrially complex nu-metalcore record that bleeds with sophisticated rawness that comes from years of refined singing, songwriting, and a sheer talent. Deathmatch feels like a product produced by an act that has been together for a decade, exploring their strengths. Well-balanced and cohesive, Luna Kills take a full-bodied dive into the nu-metalcore scene that is rapidly growing, rising to the very top amongst some of the great international metal bands surfacing – Alien Weaponry, Bloodywood, Calva Louise, LANDMVRKS. But like the aforementioned, Luna Kills is blazing a path of its own.
The path written for them in the stars follows the incorporation of elements of film, video games, and television into their work. Mostly due to the role that music can play in the psychology of the consumer. “Because music, whether it is in a movie, TV, or video game, it’s a really big part in how we perceive the story and those moments. There’s a lot of psychology behind it.”
That is Rautiainen’s mission after all—to make people feel something through the stories she tells. “Both things, they feed off of each other because I personally love movies. I love TV shows. I love stories. I love telling stories through music. Those two aspects are really playing a big part in our music making,” and she believes that truly is what serves as the foundation of any good record. “When we start to write music, we really want to write songs that we would love to listen to ourselves. We don’t continue writing a song if we don’t feel something special with it, so it has to have something when we start to write.”
Maybe that is cause for the level of imagination and creativity infused into the atmosphere and ethos of Luna Kills. Their love for fiction, stories, in combination with a pursuit of whimsy, makes the band a deadly weapon. “We want to tell stories and we want to connect with the songs ourselves and always we make something that is also a little bit whimsical to us,” she smiles, recalling the band’s process. “We have this mantra that, when we have finished a song, we ask ourselves, ‘Is it whimsical enough?’ And if it’s not, we are going to make it more whimsical. We are not really looking into writing just in the certain type of genre, and we are not overthinking what we should be.”
Bouncing throughout the 10 track record like a ball in a pinball machine, Luna Kills’ debut record, Deathmatch, ventures absolutely anywhere and everywhere. “get mad” and “SADIST” tap into Japanese prog-rock, while “burn the world with me” and “fever dream” explore dark synth pop. Then considering how “love u” and “LEECH” tap into the ever-popular electro metalcore, and “sugar rush” and “WAVES” tip-toe into hyperpop that expansive exploration of genre doesn’t come from luck—whether it be cultural, genetic, or fate—Luna Kills pieces together a collection of stories that transcends one person’s existence, rather it embodies a collection of people’s experiences. Vocalist Lotta Rautiainen smiles, “It’s in our blood.”
