HIM mastermind Ville Valo (VV) has released the official music video for the title track of his debut solo album, “Neon Noir”. The LP was made available today (Friday, January 13) via Heartagram Records, distributed by UMG/Spinefarm. Watch it below.
Last April, Valo released the first single from “Neon Noir”, a song called “Loveletting”, which marked his 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.
Like “Neon Noir”, “Gothica Fennica Vol. 1” bore a strong musical resemblance to HIM and featured the tracks “Salute The Sanguine”, “Run Away From The Sun” and “Saturnine Saturnalia”.
Regarding the lyrical inspiration for “Neon Noir”, Ville said: “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.”
“‘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,” Ville previously stated. “It’s a teary mascara marathon between Robert Smith and Ozzy, with a dash of hope.”
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” Album Artwork
“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
