Dark Light by HIM

Dark Light, HIM's fifth studio album, arrived in September 2005 as the Finnish band's first worldwide release on Sire, the label they had signed with a year earlier (at home in Finland it came out on their own Heartagram imprint). They started cutting it in March 2005 at the Paramour Estate in Los Angeles with Tim Palmer, who had mixed Love Metal, and the brief was a cross between Black Sabbath and U2, with the moody touch of composer Angelo Badalamenti hanging over it.

The result is HIM at their glossiest, the melancholy, melodic side of their love metal pushed right to the front: Ville Valo crooning over Linde Lindström's thick guitars, with Mige's bass, Burton's keyboards and Gas Lipstick's drums smoothing every edge into something radio could hug. "Rip Out the Wings of a Butterfly" topped the Finnish charts, and the album went gold in the US, making HIM the first Finnish band to get there, and became the biggest seller of their career.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.