RIFFTERA

track-list:
Carved in Skin
Quicksand
No Turning Back
Moonchild (Iron Maiden Cover)

Rifftera are:
Janne Hietala – guitar, harsh vocals & clean vocals
Mikko Kuoppamaa – guitar & clean vocals
Antti Pöntinen – keyboards
Jupe Karhu – bass
Ville Härkönen – drums

discography:
2011 Lightbringer Demo
2013 Back to Life Demo
2014 Open Wounds Demo
2015 Pitch Black Full-length
2018 Eye of the Storm Single
2018 Cutthroat Game Single
2019 Across the Acheron Full-length
2024 No Turning Back Single
2024 Quicksand Single
2024 Coda EP

Finnish metal band Rifftera has released a four song EP, called ‘Coda‘, on October 11th, 2024.
The EP is available only digitally and contains three new Rifftera songs plus a cover song.
Musically ‘Coda‘ is a straight continuation to ‘Across the Acheron‘ – band’s latest full-length album.
Mixture of melodic death metal and thrash metal still works as the foundation, in which the combination of tasty riffs and catchy melodies are added on.
The band’s guitarist and vocalist Janne Hietala comments:
“The clearest change to our previous releases can be heard in the vocal department; there’s now more variety than before. Basically, the same thing happened already with ‘Across the Acheron’, as the vocals on the album were a clear improvement from previous in both quality and variety. But now the difference to past releases in both vocalists’ delivery is even more substantial.”
The cover song included in the EP is Iron Maiden’s ‘Moonchild‘.
Hietala adds:
“Over the years we have been discussing the possibility of recording a cover song. Some of us have been listening to a lot of Iron Maiden and ‘Moonchild’ has popped out as a song that has the right atmosphere and is fun to play. Of course, there’s a difference compared to our own songs – less brutality and more 80’s & well, Maiden -feel, but the result fits into Coda surprisingly well. Our vocal abilities are pretty damn far from Bruce Dickinson’s, but it was a good challenge to handle Iron Maiden song in our way. We actually might have even learned something in the process.”
Rifftera was formed in 2010 in Vaasa, Finland by Janne Hietala.
The band was basically started as a studio project;
to be a channel for releasing riffs and song ideas that kept on coming.
Janne had been playing in some bands and projects during the years but besides of a couple of demos in the early 2000’s none of this material had ever been heard outside rehearsals.
So from the beginning the idea of Rifftera was basically just to get music released – in a form that it deserves.
Antti Pöntinen and Jupe Karhu shared a musical past with Janne, and after being asked, they decided to join this new band.
First years of the band involved a lot of learning and skill honing in both song writing and recording areas.
In 2012 Mikko Kuoppamaa joined the band and eventually it lead to a situation where Mikko started to take care of band’s clean singing and Janne dealt with the screaming parts.
Before Rifftera Mikko had been just singing some backup vocals and Janne had basically never been in front of the microphone so the only reason to share vocal duties this way was the fact that there weren’t nobody else around to do it.
Luckily promising results started to show up and after a couple of demos band finally released its debut album, ‘Pitch Black‘, on August 2015.
The band had no drummer before the year 2016, when Ville Härkönen joined the lineup (Thomas Tunkkari, an old friend and the drummer of Dark Sarah, played the drums on Pitch Black as a session drummer and the demo-era was dealt with programmed drums).
With Ville Rifftera started to work with the second album, ‘Across the Acheron’, that eventually ended up to be released on January 2019.
After some silent years, a four song EP named ‘Coda‘ was set up for release in 2024.