There is something fitting about Via Miseria IV arriving wrapped in shadow, melancholy, and myth. For all the talk around HOKKA being a new band, this does not feel like a fresh start built from nothing. It feels more like the aftermath of fire. It feels like the point where scars stop being hidden and start becoming part of the armour. That is exactly what makes this project hit so hard.
On paper, HOKKA is already one hell of a meeting of worlds. Joel Hokka steps into this new chapter after the very public rise of Blind Channel. Alongside him stands Pauli Rantasalmi, whose legacy with The Rasmus helped define a generation of Finnish rock, while Jimi Aslak adds a younger pulse to the whole thing. But what matters more than the names is the chemistry, and from the first moments of speaking with Joel it became clear this band was not built in some cold industry vacuum. It was born out of upheaval, reflection, and the need to find a way forward.
Joel traced the roots of HOKKA back several years, to a connection first formed when Blind Channel and The Rasmus crossed paths in Finland. That relationship stayed alive in the background until life cracked open in a more serious way. After stepping away from his previous band, Joel reached out to Pauli not just as a musician, but as somebody who had already lived through that kind of rupture. What followed, as Joel put it, began like therapy sessions and slowly turned into songwriting sessions before the whole thing snowballed into a real band with an album and live plans already rolling.
That origin story matters because you can hear it all over Via Miseria IV. This is not an album that sounds like people trying on a new look. It sounds like people clinging to truth. Joel spoke openly about feeling lost, about the confusion and instability that came with leaving behind a former life, and about how HOKKA became the place where he could finally stop performing somebody else’s narrative and start telling his own. In one of the strongest moments from the conversation, he described his past role as being the face and voice for a story that was never fully his. With HOKKA, that changed. Suddenly the cage door was open, and the songs became his again.
That emotional release is matched by a striking sense of visual ambition. HOKKA is not content to simply sound dark and cinematic. Joel wants the whole thing to live in its own world. He spoke about drawing inspiration from early 2000s pop culture, from superhero imagery to Nolan’s Batman films, Kill Bill, classic Star Wars, and the theatrical power of Ghost. That is where the red cape, the warrior imagery, and the larger than life identity of HOKKA start to make sense. This is not theatre for theatre’s sake. It is mythology as self expression. Joel is not just fronting a band here. He is building a character that can carry pain, resilience, and transformation in a way ordinary realism sometimes cannot.
The so called warrior and sensei dynamic between Joel and Pauli might read like great promo copy on first glance, but Joel made it plain that for him it is real. He described arriving at Pauli’s place broken down and directionless, and finding someone who could help him rebuild. There is a lot of movie language in the way he tells that story, comparing it to Star Wars and Kill Bill, but the point underneath it is serious. Pauli did not just help write songs. He helped redirect the entire vision. Joel admitted he had initially been chasing something very different, even floating a country tinged solo direction, until Pauli bluntly cut through it and told him to own his own name. From there came the riffs, the imagery, the identity, and the realisation that HOKKA had to be something far bigger and bolder than a quiet reset.
That sense of purpose feeds directly into the album itself. Nuclear Blast introduced Via Miseria IV through a run of singles that already mapped out a dramatic emotional range, from the piano led ache of “Heart Said No” to the heavier sweep of “Blackbird,” with “In The Darkness” and “Death By Cupid’s Arrow” helping establish the band’s cinematic and melodic core. Joel’s own descriptions in conversation only deepen that picture. He called “In The Darkness” the accidental last song written for the record, but also the one that immediately revealed itself as the right opening statement, the kind of track that felt written in the stars once it clicked into place. “Heart Said No” came through as something even more personal, with Joel connecting its melancholy directly to his sense of self and his attraction to beauty in coldness, darkness, and emotional weight.
That attraction to darkness does not come across as empty aesthetic either. One of the strongest threads through the interview was Joel’s insistence that music has to do more than entertain. He spoke about wanting to help people, about the broken souls who come to shows looking for something to hold onto, and about how the real heart of the work has nothing to do with fame, numbers, or public attention. Having already experienced the disorienting glare of a huge platform in Europe, he now sounds far more interested in truth than scale. For Joel, the album itself is the cake. Everything else is just the cherry on top.
That honesty is one of the reasons deeper cuts on Via Miseria IV land so well. Joel lit up when talking about “Murder Ballad,” describing it as a song built around the darkest, most destructive extremes of love, where obsession becomes so absolute it curdles into violence. It is a brutal idea, but one that fits this record’s emotional terrain perfectly. Love here is not neat or comforting. It is thorned, dangerous, and often inseparable from suffering. That lines up closely with the way Nuclear Blast has framed the album too, as a record where vengeance, vulnerability, and beauty are all tangled together in the same blood red bloom.
Then there is the cover of “Kiss From A Rose,” one of the album’s more unexpected inclusions and one of its most fascinating. Joel laughed as he explained that the idea started almost as a joke, tied to the cape and the superhero imagery and the fact that Seal’s classic is forever linked to the Batman Forever soundtrack. But what could have been a novelty choice sounds, from the way Joel describes it, like one of those strange perfect accidents that only make sense once they have already happened. In the world of HOKKA, with all its wounded romanticism and heightened drama, the song does not feel out of place at all. It feels like another piece of the mask slipping into place.
What ultimately makes HOKKA compelling is not simply the pedigree involved, though that is obviously there. It is the way Joel talks about rediscovering his own voice. He admitted that in the past he did not even fully believe he could write lyrics on this level, only to find that once the door opened, the words came naturally, pulled straight from the heart, the spine, the trauma, and the life already lived. That might be the most revealing thing about Via Miseria IV. It is not an album trying to force its way into existence. It is one that sounds like it had to happen. Joel said that if there were no stories left to tell, he would simply go and do something else. But there are stories here, and you can hear them bleeding through every chorus and every shadow drenched hook.
For a debut, Via Miseria IV already feels startlingly complete. Not polished in the sterile sense, but fully formed in identity, purpose, and atmosphere. It carries the ghosts of Finnish rock history, but it does not live in the past. It takes heartbreak, reinvention, theatricality, and emotional ruin and turns them into something immediate and vivid. If this is Joel Hokka finally telling his own story, then he has not eased into it quietly. He has stepped into the dark with a cape on his shoulders and a point to prove. And on the strength of this record, it is one worth hearing all the way through.
Pre-order VIA MISERIA IV: https://hokka.bfan.link/via-miseria-iv
line up:
Joel Hokka – voc
Pauli Rantasalmi – guitar
Sampo Sundström – guitar
Jimi Aslak – drums
