2022 is almost coming to an end and one of its highlights was definitely a brand new competition in Finland to export musical acts to Latin America, the Come to Latin America contest. Funded by the Ministry of Culture and Education of Finland, this competition showcased the best current Finnish underground rock and metal bands to a Latin American audience, an audience that belongs to the fastest-growing markets in the world in terms of music.
The competition was atypical in music, due to starting with a list of 136 bands, scouted by 50 specialist journalists across leading Finnish metal music media, including us! The second stage resulted in a shortlist of ten represented bands that were named most frequently, according to Finnish metal music media and detailed analysis by the competition’s partners. The final stage presented this list to an extensive Latin American jury, of which they chose three: NOIRA, LUNA KILLS, and WHERE’S MY BIBLE. Latin American fans then got to vote for their favorite, which ultimately led to WHERE’S MY BIBLE winning the competition.
Since the competition seemingly started out of nowhere, we decided to have a chat with the project’s coordinator Jules Näveri, a Finnish music industry professional, known as the singer of bands like SPIRITRAISER and PROFANE OMEN, who has been living in Brazil.
Now that you know more about the competition and its background, it’s time to take a deeper look into each of the finalists.
Noira
NOIRA is a brand new name on the scene that started releasing music in 2021. Originally a therapy project, the band decided to take it to the next level by introducing their music to metal fans. In 2021, they released their first single, “Parasite,” as well as a second single, “Karma.”
Due to illness, the band, unfortunately, couldn’t make it to the Come to Latin America competition showcase at On The Rocks, but we have interviewed them in the past already. Check out the interview here (there were some technical issues with the sound of the interview at the beginning, so skip to 4 minutes):
Luna Kills
LUNA KILLS first popped up on our radar in 2018 when they released their debut effort, “Satellites,” under the name TOCORNAL. By then, the band had already performed a lot of shows all over Finland and even some in Russia. A little while later, they decided to completely re-brand, changed their direction, and continued as LUNA KILLS ever since. The band then released the excellent, “not to be bitter, but it helps.”
We were able to catch LUNA KILLS when they had their show at On The Rocks, learn more about the band and the competition here:
Where’s My Bible
Formed in 2014 in Heinola, WHERE’S MY BIBLE was first covered on this website, when they released their debut effort, “M’n’R.” The band had a promising start, as they won the Tuska Torstai -competition in 2017, which meant they got to play at Tuska Open Air. That first album convinced us quite early on that this band must be a great live band. Naturally, the band has been playing at quite many festivals around Finland ever since. Being the winners of the first edition of Come to Latin America, WHERE’S MY BIBLE are ready to conquer the world.
Learn more about the band via our interview at On The Rocks:
Interviews (except Noira) by Bear Wiseman
Article & Video edit by Laureline Tilkin
