NEWS: Kamala return from Oblivion Beach!

12 years after their debut album “Kamala akka” dropped in 2013, bassist Emilia Peurakoski, drummer Timo Ruunaniemi alongside guitarist and vocalist Karita Kivioja have finally got in a room and prepared for us a new cut to help us breathe more easily. That one is called “Sota Sisällä” (or “The War Inside“), although to be fair a pair of members of Kamala have been busy with another project in Oblivion Beach. Yes, Kamala is Finnish for “awful” and we beg to differ because it’s Thrash Metal madness as if they have a point to prove…

Singer-guitarist Karita Kivioja explains the background of the song: “The song was inspired by the Finnish Civil War events on 1918. We visited the memorial of the Dragsvik prison camp in Tammisaari during our summer holiday in 2018 and I stayed to read the names of the dead prisoners, the children, in the largest mass grave in Finland. The grave was the final resting place of 3 100 prisoners who had died of starvation and epidemics, near the barracks area. One story was particularly poignant: a 17-year-old boy from Ostrobothnia, whose parents came all the way to Tammisaari to bring him food, but the guards would not let the prisoners who had lost the war feed their children, so the boy died in a concentration camp. And these names are on the memorial in plain sight. The Civil War tore this country to shreds and made ordinary Finns into victims as well as torturers and murderers.

This stopped, shocked and disgusted. The lyrics of the song were born from stories passed down through the family and the shock of prison camp hell. Also mixed into the lyrics were experiences of the hell inside the head and the hell in modern society called homes. Acts of the sick human mind against others, both because of the prevailing environment and because of mental breakdown. The song, which had been ready for some time now, took on a whole new meaning in the spring of 2022 after Russia invaded Ukraine: As a teenager in the 90s, I never thought I would see two European countries at war with each other. Less than 1000 km away, all the horrors of war are suddenly happening all over again. Horrors that should have been consigned to history”