BEAST IN BLACK are back with new music. The Helsinki band led by former BATTLE BEAST guitarist Anton Kabanen has released "Fear The Beast" — a single, a video, and the title track of their forthcoming fourth album.
Kabanen wrote and produced the song himself, with artwork by Roman Ismailov and a video directed by Katri Ilona Koppanen. The subject is Ridley Scott's 1979 "Alien", though Kabanen says the real trigger was the artist behind the creature.
"The song is about Ridley Scott's 1979 film called 'Alien'," he explained. "But the main reason to write about it was my fascination with the biomechanical nightmare art of Hans Ruedi Giger. Ever since I was a teenager I've seen recurring nightmares about a xenomorph hunting me in dystopian themed environments, yet never quite catching me (thank goodness!)." He describes the creature as "sensual, elegant, intense, fierce, horrifying, exotic and mysterious, almost as if it's a beauty and a beast merged into one" — and notes the irony that "it's I who captured my assailant, the xenomorph, inside a song after all these years."
The idea goes back further than the album does. In early 2020, Kabanen and Ismailov were in a hotel in Turku working on the first sketches for the "Dark Connection" cover when the notion of a Giger-inspired sleeve came up — filed away, at the time, as a possibility for album number four. The video and the cover also introduce the band's own Xenobeast, designed by Ismailov, alongside reptilian embryos that Kabanen leaves deliberately unexplained.
The song arrives with a lineup change: Markus Venehsalo has joined as lead guitarist. Kabanen himself sat out the band's recent North American tour supporting HELLOWEEN in order to finish the album, and BEAST IN BLACK head to Asia later this month for shows in Tokyo, Taipei, Shanghai and Beijing before the "Resurrection" tour.
BEAST IN BLACK have built their following on an unusual mix — power metal riffs welded to 1980s pop hooks and electronic production, across "Berserker", "From Hell With Love" and "Dark Connection". Kabanen was dismissed from BATTLE BEAST in February 2015 over what was described at the time as insurmountable disagreements, and founded BEAST IN BLACK immediately afterwards.
The current lineup is Yannis Papadopoulos on lead vocals, Mate Molnar on bass, Atte Palokangas on drums, Markus Venehsalo on guitars, and Anton Kabanen on guitars, vocals and programming.