Recorded two weeks before Painstream, the first Blind Channel album with Niko Moilanen carrying every vocal, and ahead of the one European show the band have booked to come back with. Then a special guest segment with Tori Kravitz, the host of She’s With The Band.
This Blind Channel interview was recorded with the band’s sixth album, Painstream, two weeks out; it arrives this Friday, October 30, on Century Media, after what the band themselves described as twenty months of silence. Niko Moilanen is the main guest: the record, the break, singing a whole Blind Channel album alone for the first time, Joel Hokka’s exit, the Fermi Paradox, the Megadeth thing, Scary Noise, Eurovision, and the one Helsinki show on November 14 that has to carry the comeback.
Then a special guest segment with Tori Kravitz, publicist by day and host of Knotfest’s She’s With The Band, on both sides of the pitch. The full episode is on the player below.
LISTEN TO THE FULL EPISODE NOW:
Niko Moilanen of Blind Channel joins Scott Penfold, followed by a special guest conversation with Tori Kravitz of She’s With The Band. Download the free Loaded Radio App on Apple iOS and Google Play and stream every episode of The Loaded Radio Podcast.
Twenty Months Of Silence, Two Weeks To Go
Blind Channel announced Painstream on August 5, 2026 with a statement that began “More than a year and a half. Twenty months. The silence wasn’t just a pause—it was a journey of learning,” and Scott opens by asking Niko what the feeling is with the record two weeks out, relief or nerves, and what the band learned in that silence that they couldn’t have learned on tour.
The timeline behind the question: the band announced an indefinite hiatus on October 7, 2024, played their last shows that December, and said nothing until August. The comeback statement put the learning first and the record second. “During that time, we grew and learned to listen,” it said. “Now we’re back hungrier than ever, with more to say than we’ve ever had before.” The conversation starts there, with what “learned to listen” means in practice for a band that spent a decade on the road, and whether twenty months away from a stage is something a touring musician can enjoy or only survive.
Painstream is twelve tracks: Messiah, Youthanasia, Stars We See, Into The Void, Types Of Killing, Revolution: Now, Me Versus Me, Scapegoat, Villain In Your Story, Diana, No Encores In A Swan Song, and Ache. The band released Diana and No Encores In A Swan Song as a double single on August 6, Stars We See on September 3, and Into The Void on October 1.
The First Blind Channel Album With One Voice
Joel Hokka left Blind Channel on April 26, 2025, citing sleep problems that had made touring impossible, and Painstream is the first record on which Niko sings everything; Scott asks how different that job is, and how a band grieves a member who left for a reason nobody can argue with while still keeping the thing going.
For twelve years Blind Channel were a two-vocalist band, and the trade between Niko and Joel was the sound. Joel’s statement when he left was unambiguous: “The past few years have pushed me to my limits, and ongoing sleep issues have made touring impossible. I’ve come to realize that the intensity of this lifestyle just doesn’t align with my health right now.” The band’s own statement said their “creative chemistry” had “naturally drifted in different directions,” that the decision “doesn’t affect our friendship and love,” and that Blind Channel would continue as five: Niko, Joonas Porko on guitar, Olli Matela on bass, Tommi Lalli on drums, and Aleksi Kaunisvesi on synths and samples.
That’s the context for the two hardest questions in the hour. There’s a practical one, about what it does to a singer’s night when the screams and the melodies are both his, and there’s an emotional one, about how you mourn a version of your band when there’s no villain and no fight, just a friend whose body said no. Niko also once told Chaoszine that “screaming live was easier than screaming in a studio or a rehearsal space,” and Scott asks whether that’s still true now that he’s carrying all of it.
Pain, Hope, And A Radio Signal From 1977
Painstream is built on a single idea, that pain is the one thing every human shares, and the band have said hope turns up somewhere inside it; Scott asks why that was the thing worth saying after twenty months off, which song is the turn, and how “Into The Void” got from the Fermi Paradox and the Wow! signal to a mosh part.
The band’s description of the album, from the announcement: “In a world overshadowed by uncertainty, conflict and division, there’s one thing we all share: pain. Instead of separating us, could pain actually unite us and remind us what it truly means to be human? We explore pain from personal experiences to societal structures and life’s biggest questions. Somewhere along the way, something unexpected begins to emerge: hope.” Where exactly the hope arrives is the question; the tracklist runs from Messiah to Ache, which is not the order you’d expect for a record that ends up hopeful.
Into The Void, the final single before the album, features Aaron Pauley of Of Mice & Men, and the band’s statement about it is the strangest press release of the year in the best way: “The song was inspired by the Fermi Paradox and the Wow! signal. If Earth really is the only place in the universe where life exists, we’re not exactly doing a great job of sustaining it. Aaron from Of Mice & Men jumped aboard for this one and made sure the moshpits will suck people in like black holes.” The Wow! signal, for the record, was a 72-second burst picked up by Ohio State’s Big Ear telescope in August 1977 and never heard again.
Youthanasia, Violent Pop, And The Megadeth Question
Track two of Painstream is called Youthanasia, which is also the title of a Megadeth album from 1994, and Scott asks the obvious: deliberate, or did nobody check? He also asks whether “violent pop,” the genre tag the band invented for themselves, still fits a record like this or has been outgrown.
The “violent pop” story, as Niko told it at SXSW in 2024, is that the band needed a short genre description to send to a local radio station with their demos and made one up: “So we came up with ‘violent pop,’ and the local radio station thought that it’s catchy.” A decade later it’s on tour posters. Whether it describes Painstream, which the band have said explores “new soundscapes and themes we discovered during our break,” is a fair question, and the kind a band either answers in two words or in ten minutes.
One Night In Helsinki, Then Tokyo And Osaka
Blind Channel’s only European show this autumn is Saturday, November 14 at the Black Box inside Helsinki Ice Hall, with Atlas supporting, followed four days later by Shibuya Club Quattro in Tokyo on November 18 and Umeda Club Quattro in Osaka on November 19; Scott asks how you build a set when you have one shot at a comeback, and what Japanese crowds do that Finnish ones don’t.
The Helsinki show was announced alongside the album and billed in the band’s own language as the only performance in Europe all autumn. That’s a deliberate choice: one night in the capital, two weeks after the record, and then a flight to Japan, where the band played their first show in 2024 and now headline two club dates. A proper European tour follows in February and March 2027, twenty-three dates from Hamburg to Cologne, with Sweden Rock in June. There are no North American dates on the books, which is worth noting for a band that has played more than eighty US shows since their first run in 2022, and something Scott raises.
Scary Noise, Red Middle Fingers, And The Most Blind Channel Thing Ever
Niko and Aleksi Kaunisvesi founded Scary Noise Records in September 2024, as Blind Channel were winding down, describing it as an independent Helsinki label with “no genre limitations”; Scott asks whether it was a backup plan or a release valve, and whether painting their middle fingers red at Eurovision 2021, because the EBU wouldn’t let them raise them, is still the most Blind Channel thing the band has ever done.
Scary Noise’s first release was Rock Band From Hell’s “Bloodmoon,” the week the label was announced. The Eurovision story is five years old and still the one people bring up first: Dark Side won Finland’s selection with 54 percent of the vote, finished sixth in Rotterdam with 301 points, and the band, told they couldn’t give the camera the finger, painted their middle fingers red so nobody could miss them. Niko’s line to Yle at the time: “If we are not allowed to show our middle fingers, then we can at least ensure that no one can miss it.” Whether anything since has topped that is the last question before Tori.
Special Guest: Tori Kravitz Of She’s With The Band
Tori Kravitz is a publicist at Atom Splitter PR, the host of Knotfest’s She’s With The Band, which passed its hundredth episode in June 2026, the creator of the live-production series Beyond The Breakdown, and the Warped Tour pit reporter of the 2015–2018 era who came back for the revival; Scott’s conversation with her is about what the job looks like from both ends of the email. And quite honestly she’s one of the genre’s most important voices today.
She’s With The Band launched on Knotfest in December 2022 with a simple brief: weekly conversations with women on stage, backstage and in the business of rock and metal. The guest list since reads like the best female-fronted metal bands right now crossed with the people who make those bands work: Lzzy Hale, Tatiana Shmayluk, Kittie, Lena Scissorhands, Meg Mills of Turnstile, Knocked Loose’s lighting director Taylar Glasgow, Spiritbox’s manager Rachel Hacken, vocal coach Melissa Cross, and Emma Boster of Dying Wish, who has also sat in this chair.
Alissa White-Gluz, whom Knotfest called the show’s most requested guest yet, finally appeared in March 2026, between Arch Enemy and Blue Medusa, and the clip that traveled was Alissa saying she has never Googled herself. Scott asks Tori whether the real thing was better or worse than the version she’d built up over years of asking, and whether she could resist the Google.
Both Sides Of The Pitch
Tori’s day job is sending the emails that end up in Scott’s inbox; her podcast job is being the person on the other end. Scott asks which side has taught her more, what a band or label does in a pitch that gets it deleted instantly, and whether, with music media hollowed out since she started, it has actually become harder or easier to get a band heard. He also asks the question every interviewer wants to ask another one: what nearly all of her guests say off the record that almost none of them say on it.
Beyond The Breakdown And Warped
Beyond The Breakdown is the opposite show: not the singer, the crew. It launched in May 2024 with Electric Callboy in Leeds and has since gone backstage with Knocked Loose, Jinjer, Underoath, Enter Shikari, Creeper and GWAR, interviewing lighting directors, stage managers, front-of-house engineers and guitar techs about what it takes to put a show on every night. Scott asks what fans most misunderstand about that.
Then Warped. Tori first went in 2010, at fifteen, won a fan vote to become Monster Energy’s pit reporter, and spent the 2015–2018 era filming daily videos from the ground. When the tour came back for its thirtieth anniversary she came back with it, and told NPR last summer, “I was literally the reporter in the pit every single day.”
The 2026 revival ends in Orlando on November 14 and 15 at Camping World Stadium, her hometown and the last Warped weekend of the year, with Jimmy Eat World, Taking Back Sunday, The Used and Thrice on the bill. It’s the same Saturday Blind Channel play Helsinki. Scott asks whether the revival was the same tour or just the same name, and what she wants from the weekend.
Flowers
Tori has described a lot of what she does as giving people their flowers, which is a phrase Mike Hranica said something similar about on this show earlier this year. Scott asks who in the scene is doing great work nobody has handed flowers to yet, whether she tried the Melissa Cross screaming lesson herself, and what she’d tell a 22-year-old who loves heavy music and wants her job that nobody told her.
She’s With The Band is on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and the Knotfest YouTube channel; Tori is @torikravitz on Instagram and X, and the show is @SWTBpod.
Listen To The Full Episode
The Niko Moilanen conversation and the Tori Kravitz segment are both on the player above, with every episode of The Loaded Radio Podcast on the free Loaded Radio app for Apple iOS and Google Play. If you missed last week’s episode with Dave Lombardo, or Kenny Hickey the week before, they’re there too. Painstream is out Friday.
TL;DR
- Blind Channel’s sixth album, Painstream, is out Friday, October 30 on Century Media, after a twenty-month silence the band called “a journey of learning”; it’s the first record with Niko Moilanen as the only vocalist following Joel Hokka’s April 2025 exit for health reasons.
- The album’s premise is that pain is the one thing all humans share and that hope emerges inside it; Into The Void, featuring Aaron Pauley of Of Mice & Men, was inspired by the Fermi Paradox and the 1977 Wow! signal. Track two is called Youthanasia.
- Blind Channel’s only European show this autumn is November 14 at the Black Box, Helsinki Ice Hall, followed by Tokyo (November 18) and Osaka (November 19); a 23-date European tour runs February–March 2027. No North American dates are announced.
- Niko and Aleksi Kaunisvesi founded Scary Noise Records in September 2024; the band finished sixth at Eurovision 2021 with Dark Side and painted their middle fingers red when they were told not to raise them.
- Special guest Tori Kravitz is an Atom Splitter publicist, host of Knotfest’s She’s With The Band (100+ episodes) and Beyond The Breakdown, and a Warped Tour pit reporter then and now; Warped’s final 2026 stop is Orlando, November 14–15.
FAQ
When is the new Blind Channel album out?
Painstream, Blind Channel’s sixth studio album, is released Friday, October 30, 2026 on Century Media. It has twelve tracks and was preceded by the double single Diana / No Encores In A Swan Song, Stars We See, and Into The Void featuring Aaron Pauley of Of Mice & Men.
Why did Joel Hokka leave Blind Channel?
Joel Hokka announced his departure on April 26, 2025, saying that “ongoing sleep issues have made touring impossible” and that the intensity of the lifestyle “doesn’t align with my health right now.” The band continued as a five-piece with Niko Moilanen as sole vocalist, and Painstream is their first album without Hokka.
Where is Blind Channel playing in 2026?
Blind Channel’s only European show of autumn 2026 is November 14 at the Black Box, Helsinki Ice Hall, with Atlas supporting, followed by Shibuya Club Quattro in Tokyo on November 18 and Umeda Club Quattro in Osaka on November 19. A 23-date European tour with Block Of Flats runs February 9 to March 8, 2027, and no North American dates have been announced.
What is She’s With The Band?
She’s With The Band is a Knotfest podcast hosted by Tori Kravitz, launched in December 2022, featuring interviews with women on stage, backstage and in the business of rock, metal and alternative music. It passed 100 episodes in June 2026; guests have included Lzzy Hale, Tatiana Shmayluk, Alissa White-Gluz, Kittie and Melissa Cross. It’s available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and the Knotfest YouTube channel.
Who is Tori Kravitz?
ori Kravitz is a music publicist at Atom Splitter PR, the host of She’s With The Band and the creator of Beyond The Breakdown, Knotfest’s series on live production crews. She was the Warped Tour pit reporter in the 2015–2018 era and returned in the same role for the tour’s 2025–2026 revival.
The full Blind Channel interview and the Tori Kravitz segment are on the player above. Download the free Loaded Radio App on Apple iOS and Google Play for every episode of The Loaded Radio Podcast, and follow Loaded Radio for clips from this one and next week’s guest.
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