Introduce yourself briefly, what kind of music do you make and what you do in the band?

My name is Jukka Mattila, I play guitar and sing in Throat. We play rock music which can be anything from loud, noisy and abrasive to moody, downer vibe dirge.

If Throat was an animal, which would it be and why?

Homo sapiens. Can't think of any animal more troublesome and unpredictable than a human.

How did the band originally come together?

Me and Aleksis started talking about putting a new band together sometime around late 2008/early 2009. At the time we were super excited about 90s noise rock and alternative rock sound (TAD, Fudge Tunnel, Helmet, Therapy? etc.), but felt there weren't enough bands doing that type of music, so we started our own band.

Over the years Throat's sound has developed more into our own with less interest in fitting any category or style of music. We still fly the flag of 'noise rock', but to us it basically means we can do whatever we want instead of being forced to stick to one specific style.

You are originally from the Turku area. How have the surroundings shaped the sound of the band? How was the local scene when you started playing and how has it evolved?

To be honest we've never been too social, so it's very unlikely you'd see us hanging out with local band dudes/dudettes besides at our own gigs or whatever. This means we're not 100% informed of the scene in Turku. I guess there's always been active punk and metal scenes over here and obviously the electronic music scene in Turku is pretty legendary.

I can't say the surroundings would have affected us much. The concrete and grey buildings look the same everywhere in Finland. I guess the one thing worth mentioning about the Turku music scene is how well we've been accepted by different people. We've played tons of punk/hardcore shows in Turku over the years, but also loads of really crossover bills with metal, noise, rock, sludge etc. types of bands. The response has been varied, as it tends to be in this town, but at least the people organising the shows have thought we can play all sorts of bills and not just strictly with certain types of bands.

What drives you to make the art that you do?

What else is there to do?!? This is the way we express ourselves and there's an inherent need to do it. The reaction of anyone outside the band to what we do is absolutely secondary. I won't pretend to act as if positive feedback didn't feel good, but even with no feedback at all, we'd still keep making the same music.

How do you balance between the recording process and live performing? Does either play a bigger part for the band?

Before the pandemic I would have probably said it's 50/50, but now as we've hardly played any shows for a couple of years, it's become more comfortable to just focus on writing music and not even think about live shows. It remains to be seen how the attitude changes when we start playing live again this spring.

Personally I'd prefer playing tours instead of one-off shows every now and then. We don't get to play together as a band that often and when we do I'd much rather focus on working on new stuff instead of going through old songs in preparation for a live show. I love playing live, but being the grumpy old man that I am, all the stuff outside the actual show can become boring.

What is going on in the Throat camp at the moment / do you have some future plans?

We've been busy writing and demoing new material all year. The intention was to do a shorter release as a follow-up for ”Smile Less”, but eventually decided to make it a full album, so it's been taking a bit longer than expected. It'll be out one way or another in 2023.

We also released a remix EP for ”Hospice” off ”Smile Less” where we again got some amazing people totally rework our material. Definitely worth checking out even for those who felt the double-CD remix version of ”Bareback” was a little too rough.

Once all the work with the new album is done, we'll most likely hit the stage again and really hope to do some shows outside Finland as well.

What would you name as the biggest highlights or hardships in the band's history?

Obviously every album or a smaller release is always a highlight and completes a period of work put into it. Also, the couple of tours we've done outside of Finland have definitely been highlights.

Regarding hardships, there hasn't been anything too dramatic, but naturally every line-up change has been difficult. Luckily we've managed to find new members who have been willing to put their time and energy into Throat, always bringing something new to the table and that way improving the band.

How do the visual aspects of the band come together and what kind of a role does it have in Throat?

It's mostly a series of happy accidents. There's always been a certain aesthetic we want to present with Throat, call it 'the beauty in ugliness' or whatever. It's never been planned specifically, but anytime we start laying down plans for the visual design for an album or merch, the result often quite naturally becomes something that fits the band's aesthetic, no matter if it's done by ourselves or an outside artist.

Visual aspects are very important. We don't want to put out anything that looks stupid. Or if it looks stupid, it was intentionally made to look stupid! It's so strange to see bands who undoubtedly spend a lot of time working on their music use lazy, half-assed designs for their albums and merch. To me that gives the impression they just gave up at some point or just lack vision of how they want to present their work.

If you could collaborate with any past or present artist/band which would it be?

That's always a tricky question as truthfully I doubt anything good would come out of a collaboration with anyone outside of the band! With our (lack of) communication skills and stubbornness over our music, I'm sure it would be a disaster for all parties involved.

We've had a bunch of people remix our stuff and I guess that works best for us in terms of collaboration and with the upcoming remix EP we've again managed to check off some nice names from our bucket list.

Having said that, I wouldn't be totally opposed to the idea of having Björk sing on our album.