Amorphis

Three Helsinki teenagers and a death metal demo

Amorphis were founded in Helsinki in 1990 by drummer Jan Rechberger, guitarist Tomi Koivusaari and lead guitarist Esa Holopainen. The debut, The Karelian Isthmus, arrived in 1992 and sat squarely in the death metal of its moment. Two years later came Tales from the Thousand Lakes, the record that set the band's lasting method: lyrics drawn from the Kalevala, Finland's national epic, over riffs that had started to make room for keyboards and clean melody. It has sold somewhere around 250,000 copies worldwide.

What followed was three decades of drift rather than reinvention — progressive, folk and psychedelic elements folded in one album at a time, with the death metal chassis never quite thrown away. Holopainen, Koivusaari and Rechberger are all still in the band thirty-six years on, which is a large part of why the catalogue holds together as a single line of argument rather than a series of resets.

From the Kalevala to gold records

The hinge was 2005, when Tomi Joutsen took over on vocals. He brought both registers in one throat — guttural lows and a clean tenor — and that combination is what the band have built every album around since. Eclipse, in 2006, brought their first Finnish gold certification; Skyforger, in 2009, made it three gold records in a row, with 2003's Far from the Sun also certified.

From there the commercial line kept climbing at home. Circle, in 2013, and Queen of Time, in 2018, both went to number one in Finland, and 2022's Halo topped the chart as well. The working total is fifteen studio albums, five live releases, six compilations, three EPs, nineteen singles and twenty-six videos. Under the Red Cloud and Queen of Time are the two records reviewers still measure the new ones against, and that comparison has not always gone the band's way.

Borderland and the Hansen sessions

Three years separated Halo from its successor, and the band were explicit that the gap was deliberate: rather than rush a follow-up, they stepped back from live work and concentrated on the next record. Borderland was cut in late 2024 and early 2025 at Hansen Studios in Ribe, Denmark, with Jacob Hansen producing — the first time in three albums Amorphis had worked with anyone other than Jens Bogren. Holopainen has said he asked Bogren about the move and was encouraged to try someone else, and that Michael Poulsen of Volbeat pointed him towards Hansen. The band took twenty-four demos into pre-production and recorded twelve, with Hansen involved in choosing which songs survived, the running order and the bonus tracks. Holopainen's summary is that Hansen "really made everything sound a little bit more fresh", and that the album came out "a bit more straightforward and more melodic" than its predecessor. The sleeve is by the Dutch artist Marald Van Haasteren.

Borderland was released on 26 September 2025 through Reigning Phoenix Music. It went to number one in Finland and number four in Germany. The critical response was warm but not uncritical. Andrew Edmunds at Last Rites called "Bones" the album's high point — a stomping midtempo built on a doomy riff — and praised the arena-scaled chorus on "Dancing Shadow", while concluding that most of the rest was "Amorphis-by-numbers" and the record as a whole a holding pattern short of Queen of Time or Under the Red Cloud. The Progressive Subway's reviewer was struck instead by how far forward the keyboards had come, counting seven of the ten tracks credited to Santeri Kallio, and flagged the album as top-heavy, with the energy sagging through the middle.

Where they stand now

The one piece of instability in an otherwise fixed line-up is at the bottom end. On 11 September 2026 the band announced that bassist Olli-Pekka Laine was stepping away from touring for the remainder of the year for personal reasons, with his own note reading: "Due to personal reasons, I will be stepping aside from touring duties for the remainder of the year. The low end remains in the best possible hands, however." Pyry Hanski took the slot, and Laine is expected back early in 2027.

The touring year behind them has been dense. Amorphis played the main stage at Tuska in Helsinki on Sunday 28 June 2026, Summer Breeze at Dinkelsbühl on 13 August, and a show inside the lakeside castle at Olavinlinna, Savonlinna, on 29 August alongside Insomnium. September took them to Australia for the first time in over a decade — the Croxton in Melbourne on the 23rd, the Triffid in Brisbane on the 24th, Liberty Hall in Sydney on the 25th and the Baso in Canberra on the 26th, with Melbourne's The Eternal opening throughout. October was Latin America: Santiago on the 11th, Buenos Aires on the 13th, Curitiba on the 15th, Belo Horizonte on the 17th and São Paulo on the 18th.

Announced on 1 September 2026, the next leg is a North American co-headline run with Insomnium, opening at Paradise Rock Club in Boston on 17 November and closing at Irving Plaza in New York on 19 December, with Hinayana supporting across roughly two dozen dates. Insomnium are out on their tenth album, Netherworlds, released on 16 October 2026 via Century Media. Europe follows under the Borderland Tour 2027 banner, with Insomnium again and Unto Others opening: Große Freiheit 36 in Hamburg on 22 January through to 013 in Tilburg on 14 February, taking in the O2 Ritz in Manchester on 2 February and the O2 Forum Kentish Town in London on 3 February. A Finnish hall run then fills late February to April, ending at Kulttuuritalo in Helsinki on 24 April 2027, with festival bookings already placed into summer 2027.

The show in 2026

The current set is tightly standardised and heavy on the first half of the new record. At Tuska on 28 June 2026 the band ran seventy minutes: a taped intro, then "Bones", "Light and Shadow", "Silver Bride" and "Wrong Direction", a taped "Thousand Lakes" interlude, then "The Castaway", "The Lantern", "The Moon", "Sampo", "Dancing Shadow", "Black Winter Day" and "House of Sleep", with "The Bee" as the encore. Headline shows run longer. The Chilean, Argentine and Brazilian dates in October all came in at around ninety minutes and thirteen songs, built on the same spine.

Reviewing the Sydney show on 25 September 2026, Metal-Roos described the band opening with two Borderland tracks before working back through a thirty-year catalogue, singling out Joutsen's ability to move between clean singing and full-bodied gutturals in the same song, and calling the night a masterclass in melodic metal. The Eternal played a fifty-minute support set that the same reviewer rated highly. The recurring complaint from the Australian run was repertoire rather than performance: the band's early progressive-rock period went unrepresented entirely, which left some long-term listeners short-changed.