MTV News has issued the following report from Chris Harris and Jon Wiederhorn:

Life is good for LORDI.

The empire is strong and the franchise is booming. With his stomach full from a multi-course meal at Lordi's Rocktaurant in Rovaniemi, Finland, frontman Tomi Petteri Putaansuu - a.k.a. "Mr. Lordi" - picked up the phone to spread the gospel of his band to North America.

"It's a cool thing to have your own restaurant," he said as he prepared for dessert. "You can taste a little of everything on the menu and not worry about missing anything."

If he had wanted to, Putaansuu could have washed down his meal with a bottle or two of Lordi Cola, but he ordered Pepsi because the restaurant doesn't have the Lordi drink on tap - yet. And, if he had to pay for the sumptuous meal, he could have used a Lordi credit card. Fortunately he owns the restaurant. Even more fortunately, he doesn't have an active credit card.

"That would actually ruin me to bankruptcy," he said. "It would lead me to order KISS artifacts from the 'Net. I'm a big collector of these things, and to this day I'm the president of the KISS Army in Finland."

It goes without saying that without KISS, Lordi - Putaansuu, guitarist Jussi Sydänmaa ("Amen"), bassist Samer el Nahhal ("Ox"), keyboardist Leena Peisa ("Awa") and drummer Sampsa Astala ("Kita") - wouldn't exist. Like Putaansuu's heroes, Lordi wear makeup and costumes, play anthemic melodic metal and believe strongly in branding. And like KISS, Lordi are huge. Sure, they're still relatively unknown in North America, but their 2006 album, The Arockalypse - which comes out on these shores March 20th - is triple-platinum in Finland and nearly as huge across the rest of Europe.

But there's a major difference between Lordi and KISS. While KISS' image stems from cartoons and comic books, Lordi's comes straight from horror movies, which has drawn them comparisons to GWAR.

"I am not offended, but I didn't know [about] Gwar until people in Germany asked me about them in interviews," Putaansuu said. "They are so obscure in Europe that it's easy to miss them. I was much more influenced by people like Freddy Krueger, Jason Voorhees, Leatherface and Pinhead and the Cenobites from Hellraiser. I have always been fascinated with monsters and learned to do prosthetic makeup when I was 10 years old."

Putaansuu started Lordi in 1992 as a one-man project and released the band's first demo. Three years later, he recruited friends from the KISS Army and wrote songs that blended the simplicity of KISS, the edge of W.A.S.P. and the drive of ACCEPT. Numerous label auditions fell on deaf ears before Lordi were signed in 2002 and released their debut, Get Heavy. They followed two years later with The Monsterican Dream, but Lordi remained an underground phenomenon until last year, when they were contacted by staffers at the pop-music Eurovision Song Contest to represent Finland.

"It's a really kitschy competition, and there was no way in hell any band in Europe would join if they wanted to take themselves seriously," Putaansuu said of the event that launched his band's mainstream career. "But at the time, we had nothing to lose because we were kind of marginal. Metal people thought we were too melodic and mainstream audiences thought we would come and burn their churches."

Lordi played the stomping 'Hard Rock Hallelujah' on the televised program and swept the semifinals with 42 percent of the total vote for 12 different contestants, many of whom played Finnish folk music or pop. Then, in January 2006, Lordi competed at the finals. "We felt so out of place there," Putaansuu said. "It was like if BOB DYLAN went to a black-metal festival. But all the hard-rock people and metal people came out of the woodwork and voted for us and we won with the highest-ever points in Eurovision history."

The victory propelled Lordi to stardom and piqued the interest of former KISS manager Bill Aucoin, who linked up with the band. Lordi will make their US debut May 5th - 6th at the Bamboozle festival in East Rutherford, New Jersey. A full US tour is also being planned.

"I don't know if we'll have the same success in the States, but we'd like to," Putaansuu said. "All of our influences come from the States - metal and movie culture. So it would be a great way of saying we have arrived."