HIM Announce Break Up And Final Tour

Today is a sad day for the metal community, as, after 26 years of creating ground-breaking music that has ‘love and metal intertwined’, Finnish rockers HIM have announced they will be disbanding. Pioneers of the Love Metal genre, HIM’s records have blended thoughtful, moving lyrics with a fiery dose of metal and hard rock melodies, and their eight studio albums have helped alter many people’s perception of what metal can and should represent, garnering the band a legion of devoted fans along the way. Since their formation all the way back in 1991, the five-piece have explored the juxtaposition of light and dark, good and evil, feeling powerful and powerless, in a way which continues to resonate with the music world of today, as shown by the success of their swansong album ‘Tears on Tape’, just as much as it did back then.

It is such a rarity for a band to not only create a distinctive sound of their own across their records, but for them to break the boundaries of genre entirely, and create something as beautifully poignant as it is unprecedented and unique. We can only hope that their uncompromising commitment to their creativity will go on to inspire the next generation of bands whose music transcends the trappings of genre definitions to not be afraid of what they are creating, and instead to embrace it and build something limitless and powerful around it. For now though, this appears to be the end of the road for HIM themselves, as they close the door on over a quarter of a century of pioneering music, and are ‘released into the wild’ to ‘make way for sights, scents and sounds yet unexplored’.

​Luckily for fans of HIM, there is still a chance to see them perform live one final time, as the band have announced a farewell tour which currently spans 35 shows in 14 countries, with USA and Finnish dates still to be announced. The current tour schedule is below, with tickets going on sale at 9am on Wednesday the 8th of March:

JUNE
WED 14 SPAIN BARCELONA RAZZMATAZZ
THU 15 SPAIN MADRID LA RIVIERA
FRI 16 SPAIN SANTANDER SALA ESCENRIO
SAT 17 PORTUGAL PORTO HARD CLUB

JULY
SAT 01 FINLAND HELSINKI TUSKA FESTIVAL
THU 13 FINLAND TUURI MILJOONAROCK

NOVEMBER
FRI 24 RUSSIA ST PETERSBURG DK LENSOVETA
SAT 25 RUSSIA ST PETERSBURG DK LENSOVETA
SUN 26 RUSSIA MOSCOW CLUB STADIUM LIVE
TUE 28 POLAND WARSAW STODOLA
WED 29 GERMANY HAMBURG DOCKS

DECEMBER
FRI 01 GERMANY BERLIN COLUMBIAHALLE
SAT 02 CZECH REP. PRAGUE FORUM KARLIN
MON 04 GERMANY LEIPZIG HAUS AUENSEE
TUE 05 GERMANY MUNCHEN TONHALLE
WED 06 SWITZ. ZURICH X-TRA
THU 07 ITALY MILAN ALCATRAZ
FRI 08 GERMANY KOLN PALLADIUM
SAT 09 LUX. ESCH-SUR-ALZETTE ROCKHAL
MON 11 HOLLAND AMSTERDAM PARADISO
TUE 12 HOLLAND TILBURG 013
THU 14 SCOTLAND GLASGOW BARROWLAND
FRI 15 ENGLAND NOTTINGHAM ROCK CITY
SAT 16 ENGLAND MANCHESTER ACADEMY
SUN 17 ENGLAND LONDON ROUNDHOUSE