Official CHILDREN OF BODOM Book Announced

Drummer Jaska Raatikainen, bassist Henri "Henkka T. Blacksmith" Seppälä and keyboardist Janne Wirman have announced the launch of the first official CHILDREN OF BODOM book. Sign up at childrenofbodombook.com for the chance to get a name printed in the book, a special subscriber-only discount when preorder begins, and to hear all the news first.

Raatikainen, Seppälä and Wirman said in a statement: "Since we stopped making music and suffered the tragic loss of our brother Alexi [Laiho, CHILDREN OF BODOM frontman], we've been remembering so many great times that we had together. In 2023 it will be the thirty years since Alexi and Jaska formed a band, and the time is right for us to create a book which tells the story of CHILDREN OF BODOM in our own words and includes lots of photographs — many never published before — from our own collections."

As previously reported, CHILDREN OF BODOM's final concert, which took place on December 15, 2019 at the Black Box in Helsinki Ice Hall in Helsinki, Finland, will be released later this year as a live album.

Alexi passed away on December 29, 2020 in his home in Helsinki, Finland. He died of alcohol-induced degeneration of the liver and pancreas connective tissue. Furthermore, Laiho had a cocktail of painkillers, opioids and insomnia medication in his system. He had suffered from long-term health issues leading up to his death.

Laiho and Raatikainen founded CHILDREN OF BODOM in 1993, and the band was one of the most internationally acclaimed metal acts in Finland up until their very last farewell concert. In 2020, Alexi put together BODOM AFTER MIDNIGHT, which recorded three songs and shot one music video, all of which were released posthumously.

Besides CHILDREN OF BODOM, Laiho had played in such acts as WARMEN, SINERGY, KYLÄHULLUT and THE LOCAL BAND. Awarded with a Metal Hammer Golden God and several other international prizes, the guitarist was also the main star, leading a group of one hundred guitar players at the Helsinki Festival in 2015 in "100 Guitars From Hel" — a massive concert piece he composed.

Last year, Raatikainen, Seppälä and Wirman discussed publicly for the first time the circumstances that led to the band's split and ultimately Laiho's death. In an interview with Finland's Helsingin Sanomat, the three surviving members of CHILDREN OF BODOM said the real reason for the band's breakup was not that they wanted to stop touring in order to spend more time with their families, which is how Laiho explained it to Helsingin Sanomat in November 2019. Instead, what caused the group to split was Laiho's substance abuse, and that is also what eventually killed him a year after they went their separate ways.