Coming to its XII edition hosted on March 7th and 8th, 2025, Turku Saatanalle has been one of the most resilient extreme metal events in Finland, facing constant problems almost every year in one way or another, but always pulling through egregiously. This time the main issue was the forced change of venue when Utopia, housing the last few editions of the event, changed ownership and canceled the already planned future events in the process. This didn’t of course discourage the guys at Metallihelvetti, who promptly found an alternative in the horse racing track situated a few kilometers outside of town, in Metsämäki.
Of course, as the venue is not as easily reachable by foot as the previous one, a shuttle service has been arranged to carry the bulk of the audience to and from the venue, but also many came with their own car or via cab and similar arrangements. Eventually, it all worked out fine and the fans could enjoy another two days of relentless black metal, albeit in a bit weirder setting than usual.
The first day of the festival was also the main reason why the event originally went very quickly sold out, seeing that BEHERIT would be playing another of the very selected shows they have been performing over the last year. Eventually, the bigger capacity of the new venue allowed for more people to join in, and the event went short of about 20 tickets to sell out in the new location as well.
The evening began with Tallinn-based KÕDU, who gave a great display of energy led by their charismatic frontwoman Samantha Surmatalv, followed by Belgian DIKASTERION bringing their bland of blackened death metal to the fans in the outskirts of Turku. CURSE UPON A PRAYER hit much closer to home with a proper display of Finnish black metal, and the change to perform their latest effort “The Worship: Orthoprax Satanism” to their fans, while Brazilian POWER FROM HELL livened up the atmosphere with their South American enthusiasm and rawness of old reminiscent of BATHORY and VENOM. MORBOSIDAD brought here their charged “morboso metal” maybe for the last time (at least according to the band) and was as convincing as always, unleashing their Hispanic war metal on the crowd.
Finally, BEHERIT, which was pretty adamant about not having any professional filming done during the show, crushed it with a solid performance, according to most people second only to their comeback gig in Oulu last year. The use of electronic elements and effects merged quite nicely with the current incarnation of the band, but at the same time would have been nice to hear a more “pure” display of black metal in the traditional sense, being our first time seeing the band live. Here are our photos from the evening…
KÕDU
DIKASTERION
CURSE UPON A PRAYER
POWER FROM HELL
MORBOSIDAD
