Photo by Joonas Juntunen
King Satan will be releasing their fifth album Black Magick Abraxas in just over a month, and as is tradition at this point with each album cycle, we once again got in touch with King Aleister Satan for another extensive chat, this time taking a retrospective look at the past whilst simultaneously looking to what the future has in store for King Satan.
So it has been said that Black Magick Abraxas is going to be the last King Satan album for a while, or potentially ever. What sparked that decision?
Yeah, we said that indeed. I kind of regret saying it already because it caused lots of misunderstandings, but it feels very strongly like that right now. There are many reasons behind it. I have been a very album oriented artist for the whole of my career, and now with the Black Magick Abraxas album finished, I feel that this way of working has come to an end and there’s nothing more to add to it from us (or me). We have come full circle now. I feel we need a new cycle to go through next, and I feel that thinking our next phase through traditional album format in the way we’ve been doing ’em so far, would be restricting after this.
My reason to form this project was to create something which doesn’t repeat itself, but continues to push the boundaries, not only coming from outside, but from ourselves as well. I must clarify, that this does not mean that I and we would stop making music, or playing live, not at all. We will play live for sure, we love that very much and demand for live shows seems to be higher than ever. And we will continue creating, but the means of manifestation will be different. It is not like we are clueless about our future, but for that, and time will come to manifest that. Now we focus on Black Magick Abraxas with the attention it deserves as it is the album where King Satan comes a full circle indeed, and it also includes the blueprint of our future as well.
When you started to write the album, did you know, or did the decision come once the album had been written/created?
I had a feeling when I was composing and recording it, but once I heard the final mastered version of the album, then I just knew. Old cycle ends, new cycle begins. And the new cycle begins where the old ends, that is Black Magick Abraxas.
It almost feels like you’ve come full circle – whilst each King Satan album has its own identity, Black Magick Abraxas almost feels like the spiritual successor to your debut album King Fucking Satan. Did you intentionally look to the past or did the connection just happen organically?
To me it is that very much so. Compositions happen always quite spontaneously, this time too. They just happen. Production part is another thing, when the idea becomes a record, it requires some planning. Except with King Fucking Satan, which was just happened while doing it. Hence each song has different sounds and all that.
I usually give a spin of the old stuff after the new is out. I don’t know, perhaps it’s nostalgia, perhaps it’s just vibing or just for fun, or some kind of educational process. Or all of them together, who knows, I just do it. King Fucking Satan was a very raw and intuitive album, which made no sense at the time even for myself, but it felt still more real and right than anything I had done before. It felt like that still even after The Devil’s Evangelion. It sounded still quite mad and irrational, but very powerful. The Devil’s Evangelion is quite the opposite of the debut when it comes to production, and same with actually all the albums after the debut, but the production of The Devil’s Evangelion involved most working and planning. I’m very proud of the result, but I thought, how we could combine the insanity of the debut and the production techniques of The Devil’s Evangelion together? And with Black Magick Abraxas I think we managed to do that.
Big thanks for that belongs to Janne Tolsa (Studio Note On/Turmion Kätilöt/Tarot), who was the mastering engineer already with Occult Spiritual Anarchy and The Devil’s Evangelion, but I invited him to be a co-producer also for this album. He really gets our vision, and with him on board with his holistic professionalism in the pre-production part already, I got back the devil-may-care spontaneity to the production process too. With Mr. Tolsa handling the nuances and all that with stem-mastering, I could concentrate more to channelling whatever is to be channelled when the gates of underworld opens again with full power. (If you ask me, Tolsa should’ve had co-mixing credits with me, but he insisted that he did stem-mastering and co-producing, so I respected his wish, heh. Potato, potahto).
Looking back to the debut, it featured several guest appearances from noted musicians – something that has continued throughout the course of the band’s career. Has anything changed about how you would go about ‘recruiting’ a guest appearance now that you’ve become a more established band? And who has been your favourite musician to collaborate with?
So far it has never really felt recruiting really. Everything happens quite spontaneously. Guest artists were usually friends already before asking them to guest. Except Erja Lyytinen on Black Magick Rock ‘N’ Roll. We played on the same festival bill in SaariHelvetti, and saw each other’s shows which we enjoyed and met after the shows. We stayed in touch after that, it just clicked. Then I prompted the question that if she’d wanna do a song together, to which she said yes. She’s a really cool person, and great to work with, so I am happy that our paths did come across like that!
With the debut it was quite effortless to record so many guests, because Horna, Barathrum, Kyy, Sacrificium Carmen, Abyssion etc. were all my clients at my Blackvox Studio one way or another during the debut album process. When I worked in the studio as a sound engineer and producer. I just wanted to experiment with the people I clicked with, and we didn’t give it much of a thought you know, heh. I don’t think we had any quests in our second album I Want You To Worship Satan at all, but with Occult Spiritual Anarchy we had our old guitarist Dalai Daimonicus doing guest and our friend Suvi Lammi as well.
With The Devil’s Evangelion there were drunken party promises made by Thomas and Andrea of Nachtmahr and Chris Eggvn, who had become friends already earlier, during our shows together. Drunken promise or not, the promises were kept! And we are really honored by that. Lasse Launimaa from my other band Henget (and also SlowFall and Thyrane) did guest there in the orchestral section of one song, probably a drunken promise too on that one. Musicians don’t make promises when sober I guess, hah. With Black Magick Abraxas, I think Saku Solin also agreed to do Abraxas Rising guest vocals during a drunken after show party when we played with Turmion Kätilöt. And now that I think of it, Janne Tolsa also become our mastering engineer and co-producer because of a drunken promise, which was (for our fortune) kept!
I have no way to pick a favourite, everyone has brought something special to the songs that can’t be compared with each other.
When it comes to music videos, with each album release the quality and grandiose of the videos seems to increase! If you could go back to either revisit an early video or create a video for a song that never got one, what would it be?
Thank you for such kind words! I love to direct music videos, and we have a really great video crew these days, so they are most of the time very fun to make. Surprisingly there is not a single video I would want to revisit. They are all the best version of their ingredients, context and time. As for videos I never did: I wanted to make a music video for Sex Magick during the debut album, but we chose Satanized (Praise Hail Satan!) instead for that spot. I don’t regret the choice per se, because Satanized (Praise Hail Satan!) become our first hit. And Dance with the Devil felt like a better follow up to Satanized rather than Sex Magick so it was left undone.
I would’ve wanted to make music video for Fuck The World on the second album and I had even script for it, but we did All Magick Is Chaos Magick instead. With The Devil’s Evangelion I wanted to make music video for The Devils and Saints too, but budgets always become an issue. Of course there is no one telling me not to do music videos to old songs, so let’s see what the future brings after Black Magick Abraxas.
In the earlier days of the band, there was almost a revolving door of different musicians and band members before you reached your current stable lineup with album number three, Occult Spiritual Anarchy. Has the songwriting gotten easier now that you’ve completed your third album together with the same lineup, or has nothing changed in that regard?
I don’t want it to be easy. Easy means mediocre or dull, at least for me. I want to challenge myself and I want people around me to challenge themselves as well, or there’s no way to work with me. If you can’t keep up with me, then you are out. I will make this clear when people come to work with me in the context of King Satan. Because of this, it took some time to find a stable line-up. But more the merrier. It happens quite organically, without forcing most of the times.
I do appreciate our early days line-ups as well, (almost) everyone brought excellent things to the table during the time they were a part of the band, and when their priorities changed, it was time to move on. But the current line-up since 2019 has been proven to be the same kind of serpent shedding its skin-type of people than yours truly, sharing same kind of philosophy with creativity and musical working in general. And also outside of music too. I want King Satan to really create something, not to combine things already existing. And that requires bending the boundaries of one’s mind to the point it breaks a little, so something from new can enter, cause chemical-like reaction and help it grow into completely something else new. Like a muscle tears, and regrows bigger. And with the new understanding and skill set, you can emerge what you were, and emanate it into a record.
For myself at least, who has seen the band in several iterations over the years, the live show still has the same raw energy and chaos that made me initially fall in love with the band back in 2017. How do you manage to maintain such a powerful live presence to the performance, no matter who is playing with the band?
I have always kept the band line-up consistent when it comes to the energy and presence. I am aware of my own energy and capacity (to some extent at least) and I need the other members to resonate with me first in an elevating way, and then they usually also resonate with each other as well. And that makes the show how it should be. Proper chemistry is really, really important and a big thing for this. The people who I want to be with in a band are there for a reason. I’ve been really lucky that I have had such privilege to work with many wonderful, skilled and hard-working people over the years.
Keeping on the subject of live performances, I saw the videos of you at Masters Of Rock on that huge stage and it really looked like you were destined to fill such a space – so it must have been a huge highlight of your show history. However, is there anything you’d like to achieve with your live shows that you haven’t quite managed to do yet?
It was indeed a highlight for sure. It was beyond awesome to perform on one of the biggest metal stages in Europe for sure. The energy is unbelievable in such milieu. I could get used to that. But I do love the intimate club shows as well. I feel like I’m on the skin of everyone in the audience, and audience is on my skin. I love that feeling as well. As for the things that I’d like to achieve still: we have never performed outside of Europe, of which we have toured in 19 countries already. Would love to go Asia, South America, North America next. Hope it happens some day!
I find it interesting that as the years have progressed, the sound on your albums has perhaps moved closer to how you sound live. For example, King Fucking Satan is a lot more electronically-driven (to a point) compared to your later releases, whereas your live show has generally tended to lean more towards more of a metal sound and approach. Did this happen on its own, or was it more of a conscious thing?
I guess it all revolves around the nature of the beats here. When I started the band I never imagined I would have a real drummer (To be honest, I didn’t even think this band will fly longer than the demo EP I made in 2015, hah). Anyway, I wanted to do The Prodigy style music but with an extreme metal emphasis. I liked to program the beats with a drum machine and use lots of samples, and some parts of my own playing, so that I could get the exact sounds I wanted. But sometime in 2017 I wanted to develop our live show into a more immersive experience. Real drums on stage always sounded more powerful than programmed beats or samples, as the human factor is a strong spice. So I asked my ex-drummer from Saturnian Mist, Sir Changa McKenna to join as a percussionist and live drummer to enhance the performances on the top of the drum beats. And the quality of the shows just got much better.
Then with I Want You To Worship Satan, I wanted to do that on the record as well, to combine beats and real drumming. Unfortunately Sir Changa McKenna was battling with his personal life issues at the time, so he couldn’t finish the recordings when they were happening, so I had to play the drums for over the half of the songs myself. This delayed a little bit the idea of having live sounds on that album, because I wouldn’t play the drums live, so I relied heavily on trigger sounds and additional effects again as well.
We had to find a new drummer, and then we found Pete Hellraiser. With him on board we had now the required skills of musicianship but also technical understanding to combine all with backing track effects both on stage and studio together with real drum playing. So, we decided that we want to make our next record to sound very organic and live-like and we have been proceeding on that path ever since.
It’s overwhelming really to think about what effect we have to so many people, when we are not that big of a band. But when people tell us that our music and or lyrics have saved them from suicide or gave them energy to overcome most difficult challenges in their lives, that has been something I have no words for. I for one wrote the songs partially for the same reasons, and if someone else gets that from our music, I’ve done my job better than I ever wished for. I don’t know how anything else can top that. This said, every time when people have taken King Satan related tattoos, that has been saying more than words ever could. It is also beyond amazing and humbling to hear, that my lyrics has been helped people to find their own path and own world view. It’s still really hard to digest all this, because the band has grown faster than I have mentally.
Okay, and what about the worst? I do love a bit of controversy and you guys do seem to attract it!
Heh, I could start with the same sentence to answer this: It’s really indeed overwhelming really to think about what effect we have to so many people, when we are not that big of a band. It is almost next to impossible to pick favourites really! But one that happened recently comes to my mind: German Rock Hard’s review of The Devil’s Evangelion, because he didn’t even pretend to talk about music there. That was really funny. And I remember that one festival concert reviewer from some metal magazine bashed us with a passion while thinking he’s insulting us cleverly: “the band’s synth sounds and drumming sounded like some kind of disco metal instead real metal.”. We’ll yeah? That’s exactly what we intended to sound, hah. Most of the people who encounter us, either fall in love with us or start hating us with passion.
Finally, looking towards the future, if Black Magick Abraxas is the final King Satan album…then what’s next?
My first answer answered this actually. And the answer can be found from the Black Magick Abraxas album already. It will be our reality for the unforeseeable future.
Thank you for the interview once again!
Black Magick Abraxas is released on 6th November and can be preordered from here, with various different formats available! Current tour dates run as follows:
01/10/2026 – Olympia, Tampere (Lost In Music Festival 2026)
14/11/2026 – Fuusio, Turku, Fuusio (Support by Bloody Falls, Black Totem)
20-21/11/2026 – Hellsinki Industrial Festival 2026 (King Satan feat. Erja Lyytinen Special Show)
28/11/2026 – Haitaritehdas, Kouvola (Support by Deathropy, Kollectivist)
19/12/2026 – Dinosaurock Club, Mikkeli (Support by Deathropy, Nitrik)
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