CHTHONIC have released "Näin Määrättiin", a collaboration with Finnish singer and lyricist Mariska that the band describes as the first love song of their career — and the first extreme metal track Mariska has ever put her voice to.
The song started somewhere very far from romance. Its lyrics were built from the final words Taiwanese political prisoners wrote to the people they loved before they were executed during the era Taiwan now calls the White Terror. Digging through that material, vocalist Freddy Lim went looking for its echo elsewhere and found it in Finland: a national history with its own inventory of separation, loss and survival.
Then came the detail that turned a theme into a song. Lim discovered that during the Winter War, Finnish resistance to the soviet invasion of 1939 was reported regularly in Taiwan Minpao, the first newspaper founded by Taiwanese people. A small country holding out against impossible odds gave Taiwanese readers something to hold onto. Many of those same readers would be political prisoners themselves within a decade.
"This takes me back to my good old punk hardcore days — it's a really interesting experience," Mariska says of the collaboration. "When I first heard CHTHONIC, their powerful music and videos made a deep impression on me. So when they contacted me and suggested a collaboration, I agreed almost immediately. I hope listeners can feel the sadness in the song, but also find comfort in it. Death is something we all have to face sooner or later, and none of us can avoid it."
Guitarist and co-writer Jesse Ulas Liu frames it as a love song that refuses to behave like one. "It's a love song filled with conflicting emotions — grief, guilt, regret, despair and hopelessness," he says. "Although you can still hear the style that is characteristic of CHTHONIC, we have also brought in many new elements."
Bassist Doris Yeh, who shaped the demo Lim and Liu brought in, points to a change in how the band works now. "We no longer rush to release music the way we used to. Now we finally have the opportunity to work carefully on each song, one at a time."
The band is currently split across the planet. Lim and Yeh live in Helsinki — Lim was appointed Taiwan's ambassador to Finland in 2025, after two terms in Taiwan's legislature from 2016 to 2024 that made him the first metal musician to sit in a national parliament. In that seat he pushed through marriage equality, indigenous rights protections and budgets for humanitarian assistance to Ukraine, and campaigned to declassify files from the authoritarian era. In 2023 those files told him his own family's story, and he chose not to seek re-election.
The video for "Näin Määrättiin" premiered at the Air Guitar World Championships and the Oulu Music Video Festival.