Now, there seems to be a lot of pressure on you and the band for Dark Light to be the big breakthrough hit in the U.S. In what ways did this affect you during the creative process?
Ville Valo: We've found so far that the label believes in us so much that we didn't even do any demos. They didn't actually hear any demos of the songs at all. We did some rehearsal tapes for ourselves and I played some of the stuff for our A&R, like, tape-recorder shit and just hummed on top of some stuff. Of course, he was feeling a bit weird about it, but at the end of the day they were hanging out at the studio, every now and then, once or twice a week and everyone was happy. So I find that to be a really nice process — that we can just concentrate on music and be a band of brothers — rather than a band of brothers and the evils of the record industry

Did the atmosphere, or lack thereof, of Los Angeles affect the songwriting process much?
We usually rehearse our stuff really well before going into the studio, so we had maybe 90 per cent of it ready. And because we knew Tim Palmer, the producer, really well, we wanted to have that 10 per cent happen at the studio so we could play around and be snotty little brats turning knobs on the fucking control board. We could just go crazy and enjoy the moment. And so in that sense, it was really easy. We wanted to get out of the everyday routine of paying your bills and visiting the wives and the girlfriends and stuff like that and just get away and just concentrate on music and nothing else. And then the second thing was that the Warner head office is in Burbank, California, so that was close. We're signed to a new label now, Sire, in the States, and I work within the Warner. So we needed to meet and wanted to meet as many people as we can, y'know, because we're going to be kissing their asses or they're going to be kissing our asses for the next 10 years. And also Tim Palmer lives in L.A., so we wanted him to have the possibility of going back to his wife and kids and stuff like that.

So, I understand you're in a relationship right now, but you've written some real heartbreakers over the years. Did you find it hard to write about redemption through love instead of the really painful kind of love without sounding like a greeting card, or did it just come pretty naturally?
A lot of time there's balance in all of those things. I think that there can't be a relationship that's just happy. Or just sad. I wrote so much in the past about me having a crush on somebody or whatever, and I always picked the wrong person, or the right persons picked the wrong persons. It's just boring to repeat the same old thing. The new album, it's a bit more universal in some senses.

What's it like having someone like [Jackass/pro skater] Bam Margera acting as your one-man publicity squad?
I've been happy about it, and so has all of the band, because it didn't happen through the evil hands of some manager trying to marry us. He just bought our album and flew into Europe to catch us live, which is mad. We became friends and since then he's been to Finland about 16 times already. As a band, we've been to his house a couple of times and I know his parents and stuff like that, and I'm really happy that there are still weird, special, coincidental blessings to be going on outside of the hands of the wicked industry men