Finnish Deathsters Torture Killer are back to infest the the world with their latest gore socked platter 'Sewers'. Jari Laine spoke with us on the eve of the albums release and the bands first extensive European tour.

Hey, all is well over here - the CD got released here a week ago and right now were waiting the release in Europe and USA coming in a few weeks. It's a relief how it turned out after a long creative process, so good to have the table cleaned and start touring since we didn't get to do that with our previous release.

We started out as a cover band, playing Obituary and SFU tunes back in 2002. After doing it for a while started writing our own songs with that same approach and our first album "For Maggots to Devour" was released in 2003 by a Dutch label called Karmageddon Media, run into some line up problems shortly afterwards and eventually got help from Barnes who we did the second album "Swarm!", released by Metal Blade. Now we are over that and found a permanent vocalist from our area and are signed to Dynamic Arts and have a new album "Sewers" out. It's been juggling with different line-ups for the most time but now we feel we can have some continuation with this one.

The bands new record ‘Sewers’ is due to hit the stores any time now, how do you describe the sound of the record compared to ‘Swarm’ and ‘For Maggots To Devour’?

I think the progress was a bit bigger comparing the first two albums, Sewers - the new album - has the same elements we've had all this time - mostly mid-tempo old-school influenced Death Metal - maybe the focus is a bit more on the faster songs compared to "Swarm!" which had a lot of the double-bass driven riffs and songs, I think it's a bit more intense but honestly I can't point out any major differences with the style it's just slow progress and were trying to get better with our style. When you're in the middle of all I guess its kind of hard to be objective about it.

The bands previous album featured the vocals Chris Barnes. Do you think having Chris in the band for that period of the bands history helped or hindered the band?

It helped us big time for sure. The biggest of all was naturally that back then we didn't have a vocalist and with him we could make the second album become reality. Of course his reputation and history gave us more exposure. Eventually it just didn't work out and we kind of felt just sitting without going forward, obviously because of the distance and schedules he had with his main band. Still, we owe him big time and were very grateful for his help and there's definitely nothing bad to say about him or our co-operation.

What factors lead to Chris not featuring on the new album? ‘Sewers’ features the vocal talents of Juri Sallinen, what does Juri bring to Torture Killer’s sound vs. Chris?

Like I said in the previous, the difficulties with the long distance relationship and the schedules eventually led to a situation where we kind of felt we didn't have a band anymore... more like a project and that's why we started looking for other options, now we had someone to join the band fulltime and things were in a different shape now than they were when he came in to help us out. They obviously have their own sounds and I like them both, Juri´s sound is bit more lower but like I said: I like both of em a lot. The difference is now we have someone to tour and play shows with.

For a long time around the Chris Barnes era of the band, you had almost two line-ups, the band who recorded and the band that played live. Have you now settled on a more fixed line-up?

Yes I believe so, we all live in the same neighborhood and Juri, like you said, has been doing shows with us for years now so I think we finally have a line-up that we can keep on working with. Having two line-ups only leads to confusion and were glad that's behind us now.

Lyrically ‘Sewers’ follows similar themes as your previous albums, who is responsible for the lyrics and how do you approach the writing a Torture Killer song?

Me and our bass player Kim Torniainen did the lyrics this time and I think we did very well at the end, his help was massive and gave me a lot of inspiration to work on my lyrics aswell. The song writing always goes the same way, I complete a song music wise and then just start working on top of that, it's the way it has worked so far and I hope we can use more the entire band to create the music in the future because doing everything yourself is exhausting...and you get more ideas when you listen to someone else for a while. Where I usually just make stories up around, Kim usually has some real material like news or mythology and then starts to write based upon those.

We did the basic tracking back in late 2007 which means basically all the music, back then we didn't had solved the issues with the line-up yet and Barnes was at the time planned to write the lyrics for the album... after the mutual split decision we had to pull back from the studio and spend some time to write the album lyrics since we didn't have a single line ready and finally went back into the studio to finish the vocals with Juri, mix and master in late 2008.

Not really, the title track is about a Russian serial killer Alexander Pichushkin who was caught some years back. His goal was to kill 64 people, one for each square of the chessboard but was left short - he used the sewers to dumb the bodies and that's the theme on that song - all of the songs are pretty much telling their own story so there is no certain theme, they're just violent stories and pretty standard Death Metal subjects. We felt that title was the strongest for the album title aswell, and something we could have a cool image for the cover so that's why we chose that for the album title.

The album comes with a totally old school cover. How did the concept for the cover art come about, who did it and how much involvement did you have?

The cover was done by Jon Zig (www.jonzig.com) and I think it looks awesome - we had some ideas what the cover should contain, the sight inside the sewers, the image continuing to the other side of the booklet and all that but the magnitude and the sizes were all Zig´s ideas.

The bands sound is based around seriously catchy riffs which often get compared, unfairly at times I think to Six Feet Under. What other influences do you all bring to the band?

My favourite bands for years have been those late 80´s, early to mid 90´s death metal bands like Obituary, Monstrosity, Deicide, Vader, Bolt Thrower, Asphyx, Morgoth, Death, Dying Fetus, Gorefest, Pestilence and stuff like that but honestly I can't say how much of that you can hear on our music... I guess the best way to subscribe it would actually be a mix of SFU and Obituary...

The band are about to embark on a European tour alongside Demonical and Facebreaker. You must be looking forward immensely to getting out there and playing these songs live and any plans to play the UK any time soon?

Yes definitely, we didn't get to tour for the last album so this time were twice as psyched because I think we have a good amount of heavy live-songs were dying to play. This tour doesn't appear to be coming over there which sucks, hopefully we will get there eventually though, we don't have a booking agency ourselves so right now we can only hope to be on some tours that involve UK somehow, we get offered tours from time to time but at that time it's usually not in our hands to pick where the tour goes.

‘Sewers’ is your first release with Dynamic Arts Records. How did the deal with them come about and what lead to the band leaving Metal Blade?

Together with decision to make the line-up change, we also wanted to go back to the roots so to speak with our label, meaning more down-to-earth type of label is definitely something we feel more comfortable with. We've met the DAR guys at some shows we played earlier with some other DAR bands playing that same night and we got along really well, also we have friends whose bands are signed with DAR and they also recommended the label, but mostly because we got along with them personally and I can reach them any time of the day if I need to by phone... Metal Blade was good to us though, so I have nothing bad to say about them either, we were just totally out of our element.

Many of the Torture Killer members are currently or have been in the past been in several bands (Adramelech, Archgoat, Demigod) while still keeping Torture Killer active. How do you find the time and do you find that all these interests clash?

It's actually not that hard, Demigod is dead now and so is Adramelech and all the other bands we have are not exactly touring bands either so we haven't run into double booking situations yet. We're also good friends among the other bands and we all cut some slack to each other, when someone is doing a record, everyone knows it and respects it, if someone has a show or a tour - the rest are cool with that and book their shows after those so it's all cool. Also our members aren't necessarily the primus-engines of those bands, meaning they play in those, but they don't write the music so it's not that hard.

Do we have any? hehehe... hope you like the new album, I know the line-up is different but we hope you give it a fair shot anyways... Hey thanks a lot for the interview brother, cheers and take care!!!