Only two years after the release of Pariah’s Child and a massive World Tour, the Finnish Melodic Metal quintet Sonata Arctica are already back for more – their ninth masterpiece entitled The Ninth Hour will see the light of day on October 7th.
Once again, the album was produced by Sonata Arctica themselves and mixed by Pasi Kauppinen, to create a typical yet refreshing sound that defines the spirit of the band in the year 2016.
“The studio work for the new record started seriously in mid-April 2016 in several home studios around Finland,” singer Tony Kakko explains. “But the main recording and mixing took place at the Studio57 in Alaveteli, Finland. It functions as a kind of center point and all work finally ends up there. We aimed to create another melodic, beautiful, surprising SONATA ARCTICA album… Did it turn out that way? I surely think so. But maybe I should leave that for you to decide!”
After a North American tour with their friends from Nightwish plus many headline shows around the globe, the band was once again able to take a look at the entire world as it is at the moment – on the edge of a possible destruction. This spirit is reflected in the new artwork of The Ninth Hour.
Tony comments – “The artwork of our ninth studio album The Ninth Hour depicts a future utopian landscape on the background. Nature and human technologies are in balance. In the middle, we have an hourglass contraption with a knob for us to meddle with. The right-hand side cup represents the nature side with no humans left, on the left, we have the human dystopia after we have destroyed Nature. The idea I had was, that turning the knob will tilt the hourglass in one direction or another, and the other cup will slowly empty and that future will be erased.”
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