Tony Kakko

Tony Kakko — born in Finland in 1975 — has been Sonata Arctica's vocalist, principal composer and leader since 1996, and is the author of practically the band's entire repertoire. Sonata Arctica emerged in Kemi, in Finland's far north, and helped define Finnish power metal of the late 1990s: fast, melodic, with keyboard in the foreground and choruses built to stick. Ecliptica (1999) and Silence (2001) are reference records of that school, and Kakko's voice — a clear timbre, high without shrillness, with precise diction — is what makes them recognisable from the first note. His greater importance, though, lies in having refused to repeat the formula. From Unia (2007) onwards, Kakko moved the band away from fast power metal and began writing slower material, harmonically complex and structurally irregular — a decision that split the audience and cost him part of it, but which kept Sonata Arctica from becoming a catalogue act playing the same record for twenty-five years. His lyrics follow that change: first-person narratives about obsession, guilt and rupture, often ambiguous as to the narrator, in place of the fantasy subject matter the genre practised. That is why Sonata Arctica occupies an unusual position in power metal — that of a band that aged by changing.