Metal Assault recently caught up with SONATA ARCTICA frontman Tony Kakko. An excerpt from the interview is available below:

Q: You’ve always cited QUEEN as your biggest influence. On this album, how much of this influence is shown on the music, in your own opinion?

Tony: "In some sense, more, but in some sense less (laughs). This is a way more simple album that some of the earlier ones, where I had tons of backing vocals and all kinds of difficult harmony things that are Queen’s trademark. But on this one, the songs are easier, the structure is easier, and at the same time it has its own way of resembling Queen as well, because their so-called ‘hit’ songs are more listener friendly and easy to get a hang of (laughs). That was one of my main ideas here, not necessarily because of Queen, but I just wanted to write something that is fun and easier to both play and listen. It just felt that it was the right thing to do at this point, because in some ways I think we’ve traveled the progressive and overly complicated ’10,000 different parts in one song’ path to the end, and we can’t go further into some kind of weird Dream Theater thing. I don’t want us to become anything like that. We are in a rock band, and this is perhaps the most ‘rock’ album that we’ve come up with.

Go to this location for the complete interview.

Sonata Arctica's new album, Stones Grow Her Name, features the following tracklisting:

'Only The Broken Hearts (Make You Beautiful)'

'Shitload of Money'

'Losing My Insanity'

'Somewhere Close To You'

'I Have A Right'

'Alone In Heaven'

'The Day'

'Cinderblox'

'Don't Be Mean'

'Wildfire II'

'Wildfire III'

The official Mobile Songpier app for Stones Grow Her Name is available at this location.