'Take Your Work Seriously, But Don't Take Yourself Seriously' HIM's Ville Valo Offers Some Advice

As frontman Ville Valo – a charming and articulate raconteur if there ever was one – sees it, two words damned HIM to be forever stuck between two worlds, and it was all initially a joke. Those words, 'love metal'. A genre the band applied to their sound with tongue firmly pressed in cheek in the '90s.

"It was to test the sense of humour of metalheads, and rock fans,” the HIM singer says, laughing in reflection. “Some people take it all too seriously. They should sit down for a while and have a cup of tea and unwind.”

Ville is unapologetic about deciding that HIM should be the first, and quite possibly only 'love metal' band. They even went as far as to rub their silly little genre tag in the face of all those who taunted them when they released their breakthrough fourth album Love Metal.

The way the singer sees it, it's a ridiculous tag, but it's no more a ridiculous than anything else used to describe a subgenre of music.

"Take your work seriously, but don't take yourself seriously. There was this whole thing when we started out where people couldn't figure out what box to put us in, where we fit in the scene… But I grew up with Venom, who more or less invented black metal, and Motörhead and the early stages of speed metal.

"These are all kind of ridiculous terms for music really, so we wanted our own little ridiculous term. Something that meant we could say we were something else as opposed to saying we were a goth band or a metal band or whatever. Because we have a lot of influences from all over the place.”

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