Oulu has always been a home for fans of heavy, loud and unabashed musical mayhem. The ambassadors of heavy music created by Kuusrock not only catered to the demand but also showed local musicians how things were done on the world stage. In doing so, they contributed to making Oulu one of the most important cities for metal music in Finland.

In the early 1980s, the Finnish metal pioneers Riff Raff and Zero Nine operated in the Oulu-Kuusamo axis. Through determined practice and ambitious goals, the bands became household names. Riff Raff eventually hung up its gloves after three records. The Oulu-ified Zero Nine continued at a killer pace and was one of the most actively touring bands and an important trendsetter for new metalheads. The road had been paved, and bands representing the various subgenres of metal began to emerge.

In the mid-1980s, glam metal took the world by storm and, at the turn of the 1980s and 1990s, speed and thrash metal broke through both internationally and in Finland. A generational shift was taking place, and bands began to emerge from basements with the same intensity as just over ten years ago when punk music was gaining ground on the musical playing field. Speed and thrash metal brought bands back to the streets and to the fans.

With our band, Sentenced, at the former Cafe Adam premises, which was then called Rockoff, we had these Christmas Day gigs, probably 5-6 times in a row. It became our tradition: bellies full of ham, heading there to rock out. The venue was usually quite packed, and those were indeed fun times. – Vesa Ranta, Sentenced

In the early 1990s, new subgenres of metal began popping up like mushrooms after the rain. Founded in 1990, at the beginning of its career, Impaled Nazarene represented black metal but has later incorporated other subgenres into its strain of metal and continues to blaze its own path.

Sentenced from Muhos, and later Oulu, started out around the same time. The band underwent multiple member changes before finding its own style in the mid-1990s.

Underground zine culture, which influenced around the world, meaning people made these kinds of small magazines and the network was extensive. Bands started to mail C-cassettes around the world and took them abroad on their own initiative and it was very active activity, and this is how the bands started to find fans around the world and then it started from there. And afterwards record companies started to get interested and wondering what kind of band this is. – Vesa Ranta, Sentenced

In 1994, the band signed a lengthy record deal with the German recording company Century Media and spearheaded the international boom of Finnish metal that began in the mid-1990s. Sentenced's tours were increasingly directed abroad. The album Crimson, released at the break of the new millennium, shot to the top of the Finnish music charts, and the band now had tours all the way across the pond. In 2005, Sentenced performed a series of farewell concerts in Europe and South America and ended its career with two funeral concerts at Club Teatria in Oulu. A DVD of the concert was released in 2006 and eventually went platinum.

The most recent ambassador for metal from Oulu is the soaring Blind Channel. In 2021, the band signed an international record deal with Century Media and has released a total of five albums.

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Sources:

Ranta, Vesa, member of Sentenced. Oulu. Interview 12.3.2024, interviewer Esa Nissi.

Wikipedia. 2023. https://fi.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riff_Raff_(yhtye)

Wikipedia. 2023. https://fi.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impaled_Nazarene

Wikipedia. 2023. https://fi.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentenced

Wikipedia. 2023. https://fi.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_Channel

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Photo: Pekka Peura, Kalevan archive. Sentenced funeral concert 30.9.2005.

Video: Sentenced, Killing Me Killing You (OFFICIAL VIDEO). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wkLhAxbUecw