Don't bank on Ville Valo reuniting HIM any time soon: "We haven’t really been in touch"

Ville Valo has discussed the possibility of a HIM reunion ever happening in an exclusive new interview with Metal Hammer - and it's safe to say that fans of the beloved Finnish goth metallers shouldn't get their hopes up any time soon.

“I don’t find it an appetising idea at the moment," Valo reveals. "We haven’t really been in touch, which tells you a lot. If the phone starts ringing at some point, then we’ll see. I love the guys and I hope that they still care about me, too. So maybe one day, but it would have to be for good reason. But the countdown to the end of my life has started, I don’t have time to reinvent the wheel, so I have to put all my effort into whatever is happening next. It’s lovely to have a family, and lovely to have that co-dependency in a band, but with this, the cool thing was that I didn’t have to call anybody and ask for permission. I’d like to keep it like that for the time being.”

HIM played their final show together on New Years Eve 2017 following 26 years as a band. In 2020, Valo officially launched his solo career under the moniker VV, courtesy of three-track EP Gothica Fennica Vol. 1. His debut solo album, Neon Noir, was released last year to critical acclaim.

“What I’m happy about is that I was able to pull the whole thing off, and not face total hate from the audience," Valo tells Hammer when discussing his VV project. "There seems to be a new generation of people coming to the gigs, and not only for the HIM songs. With VV there’s been a lot of firsts. I wrote the whole album myself, I played all the instruments, I produced the album myself, there was a lot of me, myself and I. Where Prince and Andrew Eldritch, and all those self-centred geniuses lit the torch, I followed. I had to be really humble, and trust my ears, and trust my instincts.”

Read more from Valo in the next issue of Metal Hammer, out tomorrow. VV play the Royal Albert Hall on May 10.