Rifftera

It was 2010 when Rifftera was founded in Vaasa, Finland by Janne Hietala. Janne’s previous bands and projects had all vanished and all that was achieved outside rehearsals during the years were couple of demos and gigs. However, he had faith that the riffs and song ideas he kept on producing needed to be published. Antti Pöntinen and Jupe Karhu shared a musical past with Janne, and after being asked, they decided to join this new band called Rifftera. From the beginning the idea of the band was basically just to get the music released in a form that it deserves.

First years of the band involved a lot of learning and skill honing. Songwriting evolved. Equipment and skills which made it possible to do home recordings were gathered. In 2012 Mikko Kuoppamaa joined the band and eventually it lead to a situation were Mikko started to take care of band’s clean singing and Janne dealed with the screaming parts. Before Rifftera Mikko had been just singing some backup vocals and Janne had basically never been in front of the microphone so the only reason to share vocal duties this way was the fact that there weren’t nobody else around to do it. Luckily good results started to show up also in that area and after a couple of demos band decided to start recording their debut album on 2014.

Rifftera had no drummer at this point (programmed drums had done the job during the demoera), but the problem was solved with a help of an old friend; Thomas Tunkkari played the drums on the album as a session drummer. Also one other name did join the album lineup, when Björn “Speed” Strid agreed to do a guest appearance on a song “Rotten to the Core“. Soilwork‘s influence on Rifftera‘s music cannot be overstated, so even if releasing full length album was the main goal of the band and dream was already coming true in that sense, adding one Björn into the mix made the dream even better.

Of course there were also some bumps in the road during the creation process of an album that was to be known as Pitch Black. Everything else than drum recordings, album visualization and publishing were done by the band and since the only experience of this kind of work was gathered from the couple of Rifftera’s demos, well, it wasn’t a huge surprise that problems were encountered. However, in the end the album was completely done in May 2015 and released in August 28 of the same year.

In 2016 the long search for a drummer ended and Ville Härkönen joined Rifftera. Lineup was now finally complete and this made it possible for a band that was basically formed as a studio project to start thinking about also live performances. At the same time when main focus was on writing new songs, Rifftera’s live debut was made at the end of 2016.

Recordings of a new album started in the summer of 2017. One could think that the band had learned a lot from the Pitch Black -sessions and everything would be going smoothly this time, but… Well, no. It wouldn’t. New problems were encountered and everything just took a really long time to get done. Luckily also a lot of good things were discovered during this long creation process and band considered the end result, completed in October 2018, as a step forward from Pitch Black both musically and production-wise.