SINISTHRA Feat. AMORPHIS Frontman TOMI JOUTSEN: Listen To New Song 'Closely Guarded Distance'

"Closely Guarded Distance", a new song from Finland's SINISTHRA, can be streamed below. The track is taken from the band's upcoming album, "The Broad And Beaten Way", which will be released on May 15 via Rockshots Records.

The band comments on the song: "'Closely Guarded Distance' is the centrepiece of the album and probably the hardest to digest of the whole lot. So we chose it as the first 'single.' It's some 13 minutes long, divided into three parts. The first phase is the courting, the second phase is the fulfillment and the final phase is aftermath. Musically, it's an amalgamation of several half- finished and half- discarded songs we had lying around. I think it represents what SINISTHRA is about, with all our main ingredients neatly distilled into one song."

"The Broad And Beaten Way" comes 15 years after SINISTHRA's debut record, "Last Of The Stories Of Long Past Glories", and its manifestation has been a slow and arduous process. The songs were written ages ago while other projects, primarily vocalist Tomi Joutsen's presence in AMORPHIS, were given priority from the band members.

Guitarist Markku Mäkinen writes the majority of the music for the highly elusive band whose original and complex sound has often been mislabeled.

The band explains the evolution of their music: "We all had a history in thrash and death metal bands, but when the band originally came together in 2000, there was not much metal at all in the sound, it was leaning more towards grunge and at times trip-hop. After the first album in 2005, the sound took a lot more metallic turn and something came in from '70s prog as well. Metal genres are irrelevant to us."

The name for the album comes from "Paradise Lost" by John Milton. "The Broad And Beaten Way" is a bridge from Hell to Earth with the lyrics taking inspiration from the fall of man and from leading a chaotic and self-destructive modern day life and trying to find solid ground and perhaps even some peace of mind. "Eterne" is the first song, where the metaphorical Adam and Eve are expelled, both from Eden and from their union, and in the last song, "Ephemeral", Adam, solitary, finally accepts his past actions as futile.

SINISTHRA is:

Tomi Joutsen - Vocals
Markku Mäkinen - Guitar
Erkki Virta - Drums
Timo Vainio - Keyboards
Marko Välimäki - Guitar
Janne Telen - Bass