Jaska Raatikainen — born in Finland in 1979 — is Children of Bodom's founding drummer, and the only member present throughout the band's history alongside Alexi Laiho. He founded the group with Laiho in Espoo while still a teenager and recorded the entire discography, from Something Wild (1997) to Hexed (2019). That is twenty-two years in the same band until its end, brought about by Laiho's death in December 2020. His function defines part of what Children of Bodom was. The band combined melodic death metal, keyboard on equal footing with the guitar and a neoclassical vocabulary played at extreme speed — a format in which the drums have to sustain blast beats and continuous double kick without covering the melodic lines that occupy the foreground. It is work of endurance and restraint at once. Children of Bodom was the Finnish metal band with the widest international reach of its generation, and Raatikainen is, with Laiho, the axis around which it existed for more than two decades.
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