HIM mastermind Ville Valo (VV) will release his debut solo album, “Neon Noir”, on January 13 via Heartagram Records, distributed by UMG/Spinefarm.
“‘Neon Noir’ is a sonic step-by-step guide on how to survive, and perhaps even enjoy, the realm of VV with its abundance of things that go bump in the night,” says Valo. “It’s a teary mascara marathon between Robert Smith and Ozzy, with a dash of hope.”
Regarding the lyrical inspiration for the album, Ville told Kerrang! magazine: “I wouldn’t call it ‘suicidal’, but most of the stuff was written during the pandemic, and there weren’t many rays of sun hitting me. Everybody was in the mental gutter. Times were tough. This album was the kind of like the lifebuoy for me. It gave me a reason to wake up every morning and work on something else and try to shut the world outside. When I was working on the music, maybe it was selfish to a certain extent, but also it was a matter of survival.”
He added: “It seems that mankind needs a bit of a breather from all this shit, myself included. So I tried to put all that frustration onto paper. And if it’s love and darkness, and all sorts of things like that, that’s probably because it’s my vocabulary. Hopefully, the words have been rearranged in a fresh order this time around. But me trying to do something completely different, just because, that doesn’t make any sense to me at all.”
“Neon Noir” track listing:
1. Echolocate Your Love
2. Run Away From The Sun
3. Neon Noir
4. Loveletting
5. The Foreverlost
6. Baby Lacrimarium
7. Salute The Sanguine
8. In Trenodia
9. Heartful Of Ghosts
10. Saturnine Saturnalia
11. Zener Solitaire
12. Vertigo Eyes
Earlier this month, Ville released “Echolocate Your Love”, the second single from “Neon Noir”. “Echolocate Your Love” came five months after the arrival of “Loveletting”, which marked Ville‘s first new music in over two years, following the release of the three-track “Gothica Fennica Vol. 1” EP, also released under the VV banner, in March 2020.
