Sea Of Tranquility recently caught up with SWALLOW THE SUN guitarist Juha Raivio to discuss the band's new album, Hope. The following is a brief excerpt:

SoT: Hope seems to be an odd choice for a title of this CD, yet for me it seems to make all the sense in the world, as the album is a signal for hope for the genre itself. Can you talk a bit about Hope, how long it took to put together, the writing process, figuring out a title, etc. ?

Juha Raivio: "We started working on the album on the spring of 2006, and this time the writing process was a bit different than before. On the first two albums most of the songs were not ready when we started working on them, but now Raivio had already recorded demo versions of the songs. It was quite hard to concentrate on writing, as we were doing festivals and other gigs at the same time, but somehow we managed, I guess. We thought of the title for quite long until we realized that all the lyrics deal with the concept of hope, so we decided to go with that. It had been suggested already in the beginning, but we weren't sure about it at first."

SoT: The mix of clean and growled vocals work really well together on Hope. How hard is it to mix the two, and mix them effectively?

Juha: "On the first two albums it was always rather problematic, but as Mikko has developed vastly as a singer and has become conscious of what he can do with his voice all the vocals lines came quite naturally."

SoT: Do you like being called a "doom" band?

Juha: "Well, yes and no. I like that people call us doom because it pisses puritanic people off, but I don't like it because we are not doom in the traditional sense. I like the term death/doom, because it tells people a lot about our music and places us in the same category with similar bands."

Go to this location to read the complete interview.