Based on their moniker alone, Lord Fist, who formed in 2011 in Mekkali, Finland, were bound to appear in these pages, right? But our main source of motivation to shine the light on them remains their extremely promising old school, NWOBHM-inspired four-track demo ‘Spark For The Night’, released both on CDr and tape and whose logo alone (designed by Possessor who already worked with Armour and Axegressor) will take you back to 1982!

“Lord Fist got started with a friendly jam session,” reveals drummer, Eetu Orbinski. “We were just jamming some riffs and suddenly we had this ‘Chains Of Steel’ tune put together. After all those years of playing extreme metal styles, it just sounded and felt heavier than anything we had done before. When playing this kind of music we enter a whole other level of existence and we’re seriously addicted to it. People have different ways to reach these kind of feelings and for us it’s heavy metal. We actually think that this very song still holds the very finest essence of what Lord Fist is about.”

Like fellow retro-obsessed bands Speedtrap or Evil-Lÿn, Eetu doesn’t deny their eyes are set on the golden era of the genre but according to him there’s more than meet the eye: “Our music is greatly inspired by 1980s heavy metal but we’re definitely not trying to sound like bands from that era. We will not aim intentionally for shitty or old-sounding production, we just want to sound organic. Apart from vocals and some guitar solos, our debut demo was executed live in the studio. That’s how we got the authentic sound!” Eetu says that around the time of the recording, the band had already written ten songs but “put on tape the older ones first, apart from the title track that we threw in because we wanted to demonstrate the band’s sound more precisely and our ability to not only be fast-rocking and face-melting but also slower, epic and even a bit doomy.” They should hit the studio again later this year as they’ve received “few [label] offers already” and hope to appear on selected European underground festivals next year.