A stone’s throw away from Helsinki, Tallinn Music Week (TMW) is an annual celebration of new music, creativity and urban culture held in Tallinn, Estonia. This year, from 9 to 12 April, the entire city was transformed into a venue again – from Telliskivi Creative City to St John’s Church, 203 artists from 37 countries showcased their music, presenting a rich genre-crossing programme.

On 10 April, I attended the Blowup evening at Paavli Kultuurivabrik. It gave me a flash back to the time when I first moved to Finland in 2022, when Blowup Festival Vol. 6 took place at Ääniwalli in Helsinki as an experimental music festival (mostly for black metal). Though no longer an annual festival in Helsinki any more, the spirit of Blowup never dies out. As an active event organiser, it brings experimental performances from all over the world to Finland and also from Finland to the world – and this time, cross the Gulf of Finland to blow up TMW!

Thinking of Finland as a country of metal is definitely correct but also a stereotype – there are way more genres and styles to explore under the experimental narrative practice of the Finnish artists.

The night started with Heli Hartikainen at the small club room. I have seen Heli playing before in several contemporary music sets as an improvising saxphonest, yet never in such an intimate club room with a completely different audience group.

The set Heli played includes tracks from their new EP Interbody, which is released on 30 April. The sound of breathing created the ambience of the performance. The mechanism of a wind instrument is emphasised as a method of composition – the sound of air circulation was utilised. The listening experience followed how air was first pumped into the lungs, and then through the instrument. The process was bestowed with Heli’s emotions and the instrument became an extension of the performer’s body.

Jazz was at the centre of the improvised melodies and the use of live electronics has created a dialogue between two parts of the performer’s innerself – the saxaphone as the expressive self and the pre-recorded samples as the reflective self.

In the main hall, the Finnish acts formed a compelling triptych of experimental heaviness. Sunniva opened the night’s metal-facing arc with a sound that seemed less performed than excavated: slow, downtuned, and ritualistic, their doom/sludge vocabulary turned repetition into pressure and volume into atmosphere. If conventional metal often moves through attack and release, Sunniva works through suspension, letting weight accumulate until the room felt physically altered. Their set suggested heaviness as geology: patient, tectonic, and immersive.

Ceresian Valot followed from a more interior direction. Where Sunniva’s force was bodily and monolithic, Ceresian Valot treated heaviness as an emotional and cinematic condition, drawing from alternative metal, progressive rock, post-metal, doom, and trip-hop-inflected atmosphere. Their Finnish-language melancholy gave the music a specific intimacy: not theatrical despair, but something more restrained, shadowed, and psychologically detailed. In the context of the shared stage, they acted as a hinge between metal’s mass and its vulnerability, opening space for melody, clean textures, and introspection without abandoning darkness.

K-X-P then reframed the evening’s experimental impulse through rhythm and electronics. Their music approached heaviness not through the riff alone, but through motorik propulsion, techno pulse, krautrock hypnosis, and ecstatic repetition. After Sunniva’s geological density and Ceresian Valot’s melancholic inwardness, K-X-P felt almost cybernetic: a post-rock/post-metal nervous system driven by drums, synthesizers, and ritualized momentum.

Together, the three Finnish metal bands showed how far heavy music can stretch at a showcase festival: from Sunniva’s ritual body, through Ceresian Valot’s haunted interior, to K-X-P’s electronic trance-machine.

Back in the small club room, the French band SERVO brought a sharply defined French contribution to the Blowup stage: dark, motorik, and abrasive, but never merely noisy. The Rouen band’s sound sits in an unstable zone between gothic post-punk, droning psych-rock, and noise-rock, moving from gloomy, hypnotic passages into eruptions of feedback and distortion. In performance, that combination gave SERVO a severe physicality: the songs did not simply build; they seemed to lock the room into a pulse, then corrode it from within.

SERVO’s French post-punk did not feel imported as an exotic outsider sound; it resonated with the darker Helsinki lineage of cold-wave, goth-punk, psych, and noise-oriented bands, where rhythm, austerity, and atmosphere often matter as much as riff or chorus.

Estonian band Skoone and Sociasylum, and Finnish band Vestal Climax formed a compact study in how punk intensity mutates across generations and subgenres. Skoone carried the clearest hardcore charge: fast, compressed, and youthfully direct, their songs seemed built for collective release rather than ornament. There was an appealing economy to their set – short bursts of speed, hoarse vocals, and shout-along momentum – that recalled hardcore’s classic function as social electricity: immediate, physical, and communal.

Sociasylum pushed that energy into a harsher register. Their hardcore-grind approach gave the stage a more abrasive density, where speed became less celebratory than punitive. If Skoone’s set moved like a sprint, Sociasylum’s felt like impact: blast-driven, confrontational, and deliberately unpolished. They extended punk’s anger toward the edge of bodily overload, showing how hardcore can become not only a style of resistance but a test of endurance.

Vestal Climax complicated the sequence by redirecting punk aggression into a darker post-punk and goth-inflected space. Rather than matching the others through velocity, they worked through atmosphere, bass pressure, and theatrical menace. Their presence widened the frame of the evening: punk was not only speed, noise, and abrasion, but also shadow, seduction, and tension. Taken together, the three bands traced a persuasive arc from hardcore immediacy, through grindcore extremity, into the colder afterimage of post-punk darkness.

HEATHE gave the Blowup evening an appropriately overwhelming conclusion. The Danish band, emerging from Aalborg’s experimental underground, approached heavy music less as a sequence of songs than as a vast collective experience: dissonant, ritualistic, and physically immersive. Their closing set moved through repetition, reverb-heavy noise, metallic pressure, and eruptions of ecstatic violence, creating the sense of a sound world slowly gathering force until it became almost architectural. Rather than offering catharsis in any simple sense, HEATHE turned intensity into scale – a monumental ending that felt bleak, communal, and strangely uplifting at once.

To me, the Blowup evening at Tallinn Music Week 2026 felt less like a genre showcase and more like a way of thinking about music: intense, risky, atmospheric, and unwilling to settle into one category. The Finnish underground spirit came through not as one specific sound, but as an attitude – a willingness to let improvisation, metal, post-punk, hardcore, electronics, doom, psych, and noise rub against each other without trying to make everything neat. That tension was what made the night feel alive.

What stayed with me was how carefully the chaos was held together. The programme moved through very different kinds of heaviness – sometimes physical, sometimes emotional, sometimes rhythmic or abrasive – but it never felt random. Instead, it felt like Blowup was making space for music that is difficult, immersive, and still deeply human. In that sense, the evening captured something essential about the Finnish underground: not a fixed identity, but a restless energy, one that keeps transforming by bringing different sounds, scenes, and moods into contact with each other.

 

Blowup

10.04.2026 | Paavli Kultuurivabrik, Tallinn

Heli Hartikainen (FI)
Sunniva (FI)
SERVO (FR)
Ceresian Valot (FI)
Sociasylum (EE)
Skoone (EE)
Vestal Climax (FI)
K-X-P (FI)
HEATHE (DK)