VON HERTZENS ARE ON ‘RED ALERT’
The Finns bring nuance and meaning to eighth album, Red Alert In The Blue Forest.
The Von Hertzen Brothers release their first album in more than four years this spring. Red Alert In The Blue Forest comes out on March 18 via Doing Being.
The Finnish band produced their eighth album with executive producer James Spectrum, and singer/guitarist Mikko Von Hertzen tells Prog that, “We wanted to make something different from [2017’s] War Is Over, which was very riffy and full-on. We felt we should do something with more air inside the music, with the emphasis on nuance and dynamics. There are three 10-minute songs and it’s proggy in a way, but not the kind of prog where everything is going on at the same time. It’s just guys playing their music and building things up, not caring about the length of the song.”
According to Mikko, the ‘Blue Forest’ of the title refers to the album’s overarching themes of nature and loss, with regard to the ongoing climate crisis and at a more personal level too. “It’s definitely not a ‘climate change album’ – everybody knows this is happening. It’s more about how we are going to deal with our humanity in this situation – what are our reactions to the changing world and the calamities that are happening to us. We want to talk about the things we’ve lost. The forest, it’s green, but it’s blue because there’s some sadness involved. But it’s not a concept album, it’s more like a compilation of short stories where the same characters might be there in a few of those stories.”
Due for release on January 21, first single will be the stately, seven-and-a-half-minute All Of A Sudden, You’re Gone. “Lyrically, it’s about drifting apart from something that’s very important,” says Mikko. “It could be the end of a relationship, the end of the summer – it’s about things coming to an end and you realising it’s not coming back.”
Other tracks include Blue Promise, The Forest, Pirates Of The Raseborgian and opening track Day Of Reckoning. The band plan to film a video for the latter in an abandoned chalk farm outside Helsinki.
“Humanity is at a tipping point,” says Mikko of the song.“If we continue like this, we’re over. I’m imagining aliens coming along and saying,‘Guys, enough! You fucked it up, you’re not running the show any more’. That’s the idea behind the song – humans are so stupid they can’t make decisions to make things better, so maybe someone else has to come along and take care of it.”
“Humanity is at a tipping point. If we carry on like this, we’re over.”