Dark groove metal band Bloody Falls released their latest album, titled “IV”, in June. Metalliluola caught up with the band’s frontman Stavros Mathios via video call to discuss the musician’s background, the band’s history and creative work, and the significance of their latest album.
You can watch the interview as a video, listen to it as a podcast, or read the edited version below:
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I was reading Metalliluola’s site and realised that this is our first interview with you and Bloody Falls. So I would like to have a small introduction about the band and especially about yourself. If you could tell about your background as a musician and then about a little bit how did you ended on Bloody Falls?
Let’s start with myself. I am Stavros Mathios. I’m born and raised in Rhodos, Greece. And I’m half Finnish also. My mother is from Valkeakoski, Finland. That’s the reason why I actually moved here because I had somewhere to start. But the point is like that I started playing guitar around when I was 16 years old. That would have been 2005, somewhere around there.
And in Greece, you cannot really easily, especially when you’re living in an island, you cannot have easily a music career in metal because there’s not enough audience. Really difficult to tour because you have to be going from island to island. And even if you go to the islands, they don’t really have venues for you to play. The only chance you have is if you’re living in central Greece, like Athens, North Greece and stuff like that. So I thought to myself, what would be the best option? And I was like, hey, I’m half Finnish, might as well, actually, I move to Finland. So I took the decision in 2012 and I came to Finland. I met some people here in my first year. One important person I met, Mikael Bjorkman, that he really helped me with everything. He helped me actually socialize with other musicians that he knew of and we formed a band that was called Exiled Genesis at the time.
I was the leader of the band. I was writing the music and the band was going great. But then we had like two band members quitting at the same day. And luck had it that Marko Mäkinen, the present guitarist of Bloody Falls, came into the picture. He wanted to sing for the band so he joined in the band. As the years progressed with Exiled Genesis, Marko and I decided that Marko should pick up the guitar also.
I was feeling limited on my writing because I couldn’t write the complicated things I wanted to write. Marko didn’t like the experience of guitar playing at the time so we decided to get a singer. We got a new singer, Tanawat Thongprem, and Marko just became the guitarist.
And it was at that time, it was the year 2017, that we decided ‘let’s put Exiled Genesis to rest’. The band wasn’t going where we wanted to go. We wanted a complete different change. And thus me and Marko came up with Bloody Falls. We created the band and already had started working on an album. We replaced the bassist at the time and Mika Lehtinen came. He was a friend of Marko. They were playing together actually at the same band, Marko’s band named Deathing at the moment. After that we released Thanatos [Full-length album 2018].
We replaced the drummer shortly after and we got Rami Vartiainen. And as we progressed, I started writing Burn the Witch [Full-length album 2021].. Marko was helping a lot with a lot of riffs, a lot of ideas. We got it together, but we actually felt that Tanawat wasn’t the right person for the vocals, for the vision that we had and for that album and moving forward. We also had a little bit of a difference on goals also, where we want to head career-wise. So we decided to replace Tanawat and the last piece missing that was Antero [Hakala]. And now we have the present lineup that we have to this day.
2020, “Burn the Witch” was already ready. But because of COVID, we released it at 2021. But the point about this is that we consider the “Burn the Witch” to be the real start of Bloody Falls. The Thanatos album was too experimental. We were still finding what direction Bloody Falls should go. So by “Burn the Witch”, we had more pinpointed.
“without me, Bloody Falls is not Bloody Falls.”
You almost answered on my next question but I still want to hear it from you. How would you describe what kind of music Bloody Falls is?
Bloody Falls is… Aggressive. It’s dark. Energetic. And usually has a story to tell. Not necessarily a story out of life. It’s many times fictional. But tends to have really nice stories. When you read the lyrics, the stories tend to be really nice. Like it can be inspired from seriousness, or it can be inspired from life. But the majority is mostly fictional. Bloody Falls in a nutshell is a combination of many genres into one. We try not to overcomplicate it, and not to make it too obvious, or to pinpoint immediately what genre we are.
But hey, what band isn’t inspired by other genres? It’s not like you can just reinvent the wheel.. So you just take those pieces and you try to make something unique enough to stand out from the crowd, and not be just another band that plays, let’s say, another Iron Maiden -type band, another Metallica -type band, or just a thrash metal band. We try to do something a little bit more different. This weird combination that we’re doing, that is the black metal and groove metal and we have a lot of melody in this.
There are not that many bands that they do exactly what we do, the way that we do it. So I think that’s the best description.
Could you tell more about your role in the band at the moment?
My role specifically, I am the leader of the band. Bloody Falls is basically an extension of Exiled Genesis. Exiled Genesis was my band, but Bloody Falls started as mine and Marko’s band. It has become all of us, like all five of us. It’s our band, our baby. We all contribute. But I am still the majority songwriter. If I stop writing, Bloody Falls will die. All band members acknowledge that.
Marko, that is a big contributor also, usually sends the riffs to me, and I make the riffs into order, or the songs into Bloody Falls’s form. But Marko still gets the credit and everything, because that’s, I think, the way it should be. I just rearranged riffs. I don’t take credit for Marko’s work. But at the same time without me, Bloody Falls is not Bloody Falls.
And what kind of things inspire you?
My main inspirations that have come, like… Let’s start with the general picture before we pinpoint it to the main ones. I would say the general picture is everything. Every single piece of music that I have liked over my life. It can be from Michael Jackson to Scorpions to early things that I was listening, that my mom was listening. And then I got into Iron Maiden and goes on and it evolved.
And, of course, movie soundtracks are a really big part of life for me. But I would have to say that main inspirations, when you start pinpointing it, that after all the years of listening to music, would be more like Iron Maiden, Rotting Christ, Lamb of God, a little bit like Children of Bodom, some Amon Amarth there and here.
But when it comes now to the music writing, okay, that is difficult to pinpoint. It can be anything. It could be that I’m just watching a movie and maybe it’s a movie that I’ve seen before. I love the soundtrack of The Last of the Mohicans. I have a YouTube version of it that I’ve done a unique metal version of it and it’s fantastic. Point being that I would listen to that and something clicks inside of me. I’m like, I feel like I want to do music. It’s a feeling. And I just pick up the instrument. I start writing. Whatever comes, either it’s going to be great and I’m going to come up with a full song or maybe two or three full songs or maybe I will come up with five riffs.
And if they’re not feeling now that it doesn’t feel now that’s the time to make them full songs, I just leave them in the storage, on a hard drive, waiting for later on in the future. Many times, if I don’t feel that I have inspiration, I revisit my old tabs what I have written. I write them in Guitar Pro and I re-listen to all my old stuff, little by little. There’s thousands of them, so it’s kind of impossible to do it in one day if you want to search all of them. But at least I go to the more recent ones and I try to see from there, like, do I have a new vision? So I kind of inspire myself with my own music, like, because I revisit them and I rewrite things and I create new things. And multiple times I will just get inspired either randomly or by playing a game or by watching a movie or live events or something like that. So pretty much anything can inspire me.
“I created “Mother Your Son Is Bleeding” and it was way too good of a song to pass.”
So let’s go and continue with your latest album. Could you tell more about the production when you are creating the songs for this album?
This album actually all started with the song that is “The Four“. That’s why the album is also named “IV”. Marko sent me some old riffs on Guitar Pro form from 2006 or 2009, really old ones. I didn’t have time to listen to them so we went to the studio, we had some beers and we opened files. I listened to it and I was like, immediately ‘whoa, this is amazing’. And then there was also one amazing breakdown that Marko had. So I told him I’m going to actually create something out of it. I took the intro riff and made it into a breakdown. I took the breakdown of Marko’s Guitar Pro and made it into an opening riff and chorus for the actual Four. And I just altered a couple of notes there and there on both riffs and created the song. So that actually triggered the whole album idea.
We have in the previous album spoken a lot about biblical things and stuff like that, like “Amartia”, that is Abel and Kane stabbing his brother on the cover. And it’s the father of sin -side, like on the previous album, “Burn the Witch”. We have a lot of the biblical stories inside our albums. I decided that let’s continue the trend. Let’s continue this path that we have taken and evolve it more now towards the apocalypse.
So it was basically in the beginning, the root of murder, where it started off. And now we have the Four Horsemen rising. So I wrote lyrics about “The Four”. And it was then the funny realization that we were at the studio and Marko mentioned I think, that, ‘man, it’s the fourth album’. And I was like ‘Dude, you know what? That this should be the fourth song in the fourth album and that the album should be named the Four’. We were planning to release it as a fourth single but we were late and had some production issues, it got delayed. So we had to release it as the third. So it broke a little bit there, but we still got the four, four, four going, nevertheless. It was a funny thing.
But more now onto the song and the themes in general, I would say the overall album, we wanted to have and usually always have trilogies inside. “Burn the Witch” had the witch story that it used to be like “Descend“, “Burn the Witch” and “Last Rites”. Amartia had the “Man Undying“, “Evil Incarnate“, and “The Curse of the Mark” that they’re all three connected. And with “IV”, we didn’t do so much trilogy, but it was more songs that represent the four horsemen. You have “Pestilence is All I Need“, that is obviously Pestilence. Then you had like “Enter the Mourn“, that represents War. Then “Black Death“, it was more about Death. It wasn’t so much about Pestilence because Pestilence brought the Black Death, but Death was the one collecting all the souls.
The only one that we didn’t wrote was Famine. I created “Mother Your Son Is Bleeding” and it was way too good of a song to pass. So we ditched the song that was supposed to be for Famine. It was a good strategic move actually, but nevertheless, it was the only horseman that didn’t get mentioned. But it’s okay, he’s mentioned in “The Four”, the song that covers all four Horsemen.
I write usually those kinds of stories. When you go to Marko’s lyrics.. He has the “The Churn” and “Doom to Repeat“. Marko is more about the post-apocalyptic future, more about the present state of the world, more about humanity repeating its mistakes. Marko likes a little bit more this kind of topics. And then you have Antero’s lyrics, right? Antero wrote “Enter the Mourn“, which wasn’t supposed to be for War, but we altered it because it was war themed so we made it for War. And he also wrote “By My Own Grave“, the opening track, that that’s a little bit more personal story of Antero.
So everybody has their own way of doing things and we just try to always write we have this bubble that you cannot stray too far from it. If we’re talking about the apocalypse, you cannot start talking about rainbows out here.
I’m going to ask you to do something that usually Finns are quite bad at. I would like to hear why Bloody Falls is such a good band?
I believe we are unique, I believe that what we do nobody else does. I believe our shows are amazing, when we give live performances, we have this unlimited type of energy that we don’t even understand how that’s possible.. Having children and being dead most of the time home and then you go on the stage and you have this energy, but I truly believe that we are really passionate about what we do, we love what we do. All five of us are really into it and we are really having amazing chemistry. We are like brothers with the guys, we are best friends. We love each other and we just go forward as one. There’s no friction.
I believe the road to success is more clear than having turmoil inside the band, there are always going to be some fuck ups with turmoil, with problems and this and that, we don’t have that, you know, everything is so harmonious, so beautiful and so much good team working. I believe that all five of us are really talented at what we do, so that’s actually some extra points there. I believe we really have actually like that little edge in comparison to many other new bands that are coming out, we have that little edge that we might actually like do it, we might actually break through, we might start touring the world and we might have actually millions and millions of followers. I truly believe that, that’s the reason I’m in Finland. I’ve given my entire life for this, so I hope it happens.
“we know we have a big fan base, and they’re dying to see us.”
What are your next big plans?
Right now, we are trying to get out of Finland. That is the biggest goal right now. Since we just released an album, we are not in a hurry to start production for the next record. We want a tour, we want to go to Germany, we want to go to Sweden, we want to go to Eastern Europe. there’s Poland, this and that many countries there that they’re waiting for us.
We know that we cannot get to the US, and we have so many fans there. Latin America and North America.. Everybody’s asking, when are you coming to US, when are you coming to America, and we’re like ‘a little bit expensive’. We are not as big as you think we are. Many people have the misconception that when they see big Spotify numbers, they assume that these guys are huge.. No no, we all have still day jobs, we all still have debts, we all still have to struggle through life. Music doesn’t pay the bills, You all need to remember that there’s multiple people working behind, we don’t get all the money directly to us, and even if we do, we have to invest that money for next records etc.. So basically, US and those places are out of the question, at least for the next two, three years easily. But next year, we are desperately trying to go to Germany and Central Europe to get our feet there, because we know we have a big fan base, and they’re dying to see us.
Are there some bands that you would like to have a tour with?
Yeah, actually. The last gig that we had, was an amazing lineup: Numento, Bloody Falls, Torchia [Bar Kotelo 13.06.2026]. We were really on fire. All three really, really talented bands, so I believe that that would definitely attract a lot of people.
Torchia and Numento, definitely, and if you had to add something else in the equation, like a couple of more bands, we really like Progeny of Sun, they’re really fun guys, we really like them. They’re really talented, their music is energetic, it’s powerful, so it could work really nicely. Also Voidfallen, they’re good friends of ours and their music is really also, kind of like moody, dark, that it can easily help with the whole atmosphere. So I would say, ironically, all of those bands that I mentioned, they’re in Death Agency, as we are, but that’s the reason, we have all played with each other. We don’t go as strangers and meet there, we know where we’re heading, we know that we get along, we know it’s gonna be great, and we know that we are all talented and that people are gonna come and watch, so I think those are my options.
“I Am The Devil”. It has everything that Bloody Falls represents. It has groove, aggression, melody, amazing lyrics, and it’s just the whole picture.”
Final question, about this new album. If you had to pick one of your favorite songs from there, what would it be, and why?
Okay, this is a really complicated question. I’m gonna explain first why, and then I’m gonna take a pick, even though it’s really difficult to choose usually. This has been the first album that we have created, that all five band members cannot pinpoint which one is their favorite song, because it changes every time. Every time you think this is my favorite, you go listen to the whole album, you’re like ‘ah, goddammit, no, I like this, no, I like the other one, but I like that one also’. You’re all the time second-guessing yourself, like, all the songs are really strong, that it’s really difficult for one of the songs to jump out as the best one.
Which ones are the favorites? I would pick my favorite, “I Am The Devil“. It has everything that Bloody Falls represents. It has groove, aggression, melody, amazing lyrics, and it’s just the whole picture. It’s the good Bloody Falls promo song. Like, if you wanna push Bloody Falls somebody and if they don’t like “I Am The Devil”, they’re probably never gonna like any song that Bloody Force has ever done. So, I would probably say, yeah, I am the devil. And if I had the second choice, it would be “Black Death”, most likely.
Where we can find your merchandise and albums?
At this moment, all merchandise can be found from the Art Gates official store. If you just google Art Gates records and Bloody Falls together, you’re gonna find immediately the store page and you can buy anything you wish. And the other option, of course, is to contact us directly via any social media platform.
Bloody Falls
Vocals: Antero Hakala
Guitar and backing vocals: Stavros Mathios
Guitar: Marko Mäkinen
Bass: Mika Lehtinen
Drums: Rami Vartiainen
Facebook
Instagram
Art Gates Records
Other links
Death Agency
Bloody Falls YouTube and promo picture: Kai Lukander Photography
Interview and gig pictures: Teppo Krogerus / KrogoVox
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