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Hardcore and Crossover Fiends, Meet Your New Obsession: Foreseen HKI

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A picture on Foreseen’s Facebook page pretty much spells out the band’s sound and aesthetic perfectly: A copy of their 2013 EP ‘Structural Oppression’ sits atop a mound of vinyl gems which include the seminal NYHC classic 12” by Straight Ahead entitled Breakaway, Canadian speed metal pioneers Exciter’s Violence and Force and Liberty and Justice For…, the highly excellent and highly forgotten third LP by Agnostic Front. If that stack of wax doesn’t drive the point home on what side of the sonic fence these Finnish thrashers are shooting from, there’s even a song on their upcoming full length entitled "Bonded By United Blood." Does that drill it through your thick skull yet, bub?

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The above mentioned full length – entitled Helsinki Savagery – will drop November 11th on the highly estimable 20 Buck Spin imprint and should be a required purchase if you ever owned a denim jean vest, or at least a copy of either Vio-lence’s Eternal Nightmare or Nuclear Assault’s Game Over. Check out the exclusive leak of the track "Market Target" below and tell us you don’t agree. Go ahead! We dare you!

We recently tracked down the guitar player of Foreseen Erkka Korpi to talk about their upcoming LP as well as Power Trip and their guitarists’ obsession with Type O Negative shirts.

NOISEY: Many people call you Finland’s answer to Power Trip. How do you take that?
Erkka Korpi: Power Trip is a great band made up of great people and Manifest Decimation is one of the few current records that we are sure will stand the test of time. However, we don’t think we even have that similar style. We share a lot of influences; Mirko and Riley neither can use their voice properly and all that, if you know what we mean, but the final product doesn't sound the same to me.

When do you think an American visit will happen?
It will happen next year. We were meant to come at the time of Damaged City fest that our friends in Coke Bust are doing, but then one of our members got some family issues that are obviously far more important than anything we do with the band. The plan is to hit the states around August.

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Who is on your wish list to play with once you get here?
I would love to play with Red Death, Bone Sickness, Semper Eadem, The Rival Mob, Concrete and Power Trip of course. Mixed line-ups keeps thing much more interesting.

Let’s talk about this LP you have coming out, Helsinki Savagery.
We have been working on this album since early 2011, but I think only a couple of riffs and ideas were saved from the early stuff that we planned. We had a couple of lineup changes that really changed our approach to our music and we basically wrote the whole record in a span of year and a half. After our drummer Mårten joined the band, he really brought more possibilities on how we could make our songs better and the material that we were able to make after that was just so good that we dumped almost everything we had and did new songs.

We had a pretty solid idea what we wanted the songs to sound like so we did not take that long in the studio. We really need to give credit to Tapio Lepistö who recorded and mixed the record because he really understood what we wanted and was able to make us sound like we do on the record. We recorded all the instrument in two weekends and vocals in a weekend plus some extra days. Mixing took the most time cause we had to do it by email but everything worked out for the best. We would like to add that the whole record has been done analogically from start to finish.

And how’d it end up with 20 Buck Spin releasing it in the U.S?
20 Buck Spin contacted us couple of months before we entered the studio and offered to release our debut album. It was kind of an amazing thing really cause who nowadays does offer to release a full length album from a band who has only a couple of EP's under their belt without hearing the record first, but 20 Buck Spin did and it worked out really great. We are really happy how 20 Buck Spin has treated us and we wouldn't have asked anything more than what they already have given us. Also we have the label Take It Back on this record and they have also done an amazing job. Take It Back has been with us from the beginning and really given us support and exposure that we would have not succeeded in on our own

Foreseen HKI

Foreseen seem to be a band that straddle the fence of Hardcore and Thrash Metal perfectly. What do you think it is about the individuals in the band that makes your sound what it is?
We are pretty much hardcore dudes who heard Metallica and Slayer before getting really into hardcore. There is no lines with us like ‘These guys are metalheads and these guys are punks’ because we all have the same kind of background. We started with a more Hardcore sound but it evolved to its current state naturally because we just did the kind of music we liked.

Every picture I see of you guys, your guitarist is wearing a Type O Negative shirt. Does he have a limited wardrobe or something or does he just wear them exclusively?
Not exclusively but way too excessively for sure. Occasionally, he makes a mistake and puts a different shirt on.