Back in the early 1970s, "heavy metal" was basically a genre of one: its Birmingham, UK-based creators, Black Sabbath – a jazz drummer, an abattoir worker (dude who works in a slaughterhouse), a guitarist missing some fingertips, and a "trainee accountant." That isn't just some clever anecdote, as Loudersound explains — it tells us loads about metal's place in our global culture as a waystation for the disaffected, composed of outsiders looking in. This tells us about how metal took hold in various countries, spread and fused with punk, jazz, other forms of non-mainstream music, and metamorphosed into everything from KISS and Queens of the Stone Age to Behemoth and Finland's previously mentioned Eurovision winners, Lordi.

Metal started to take hold in Finland in the 1980s, as Professor Esa Lijla of Helsinki University says on Blabbermouth. In the '90s, contrary to the Seattle scene-led swing towards hard music in the U.S., Finland's mainstream scene swung towards Europop. Within that syrupy bed, the countercultural inclinations of Finland's took firm root, and almost every single major Finnish musical metal export came from that period, crafting the foundation of Finland's modern musical identity: Children of Bodom with "Something Wild" (1997), HIM with "Greatest Love Songs Vol. 666" (1997), Nightwish with "Angels Fall First" (1997), and later Insomnium with "In the Halls of Awaiting" (2002). Heck, even world-renowned metal cello quartet Apocalyptica started in 1996 with a bunch of Metallica covers. And now? In Finland, metal is the norm.

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