Usually awesome supergroups are formed undr the pretense of making fantastic music, though Hallatar is a combination of that and mourning the loss of a loved one. The group is comprised of Swallow the Sun and Trees of Eternity guitarist Juha Raivio, Amorphis vocalist Tomi Joutsen, and former HIM drummer Gas Lipstick, and is to be seen as an extension of the doom supergroup Trees Of Eternity (Swallow The Sun, Wintersun, October Tide, etc.).
If you're not familiar, Trees Of Eternity contained Raivio and his partner and vocalist Aleah Liane Stanbridge, who passed away in 2016 from cancer. Raivio explains that Hallatar will be based off Stanbridge's poems, and will be a memorial of sorts for Stanbridge.
"After the death of my beloved and my life partner Aleah Starbridge last April, I have been gathering writings, lyrics, and the poems of Aleah to keep them safe and close to my heart. About one month after the world came down on the blackest day of my life on April 18th, I knew I needed to pick up the guitar and try to create something or I would be truly destroyed. And something did arrive out of the darkness, and I wrote the music for the Hallatar album in a week's time. I don’t have much memory of this week, not a memory of a single day of writing the music. But all I remember when going into this abyss of the writing process was a promise to myself that whatever music would come out, I would not touch or change anything of it afterwards. What mattered was that the music would stay forever as an absolute truth of those moments as they came out. I asked my good friends – and amazing musicians – Tomi Joutsen and Gas Lipstick if they would want to record this music with me, and both of them said yes without even hearing a note of it. I am forever grateful to both of them for sharing this road with me; even the weight of the process has not been easy to carry, or will be."
Hallatar is aiming to shoot a music video soon, and will have its album up for pre-order in May.
