INTERVIEW: DEVIL’S GATEWAY: At the Edge of the Rot

There’s a storm of sound rising from Finland—and it’s not the folklore or forest romanticism the travel ads promised. Devil’s Gateway doesn’t just make heavy music—they drag you by the throat through the suffocating machinery of extinction, domination, and delusion. In this unflinchingly honest interview, the band opens up about the crushing systems behind their sound: ecological collapse, anti-speciesism, the myth of Nordic harmony, and the raw need for resistance even when there’s no salvation in sight. It’s not just bleak—it’s brutally clear-eyed.

Here, despair meets defiance, and from the shreds of a dying world, something wild still tries to grow.

1. Thanks for taking the time to speak with us! Your second album, Shreds of Life, has been out for a little while now—how does it feel to see it out in the world, and how do you personally measure its impact?

Devil’s Gateway:
Thanks for having us! It’s great to have the album out. Guess we’re still about to see the final impact, as being a relatively new band many people are still yet to find out our music. But as we aim to make music with no ties in trends or currents, the slow spread is as fine as the faster one.
We’re also glad that the release show for the album gave us the reason to fulfill the lineup. We are now a full band, with more gigs in sight. Both of the albums (+ demo and EP) were recorded just by two of us (Harri playing instruments and Hanna doing vocals), but as we rehearsed for the first gig, everything clicked so well that it was clear that we’d continue as a 5-member band. There is a new level of inspiration with new members, so we are definitely looking forward to the next steps.

2. The title Shreds of Life suggests fragmentation, decay, maybe even disillusionment. What does that phrase mean to you in the context of the world we’re living in right now?

Devil’s Gateway:
Whereas the title of the debut album of our (Eternal Grind) referred more to the processes of the death machine grinding and consuming living beings and their freedom, Shreds of Life has another perspective to that topic: the inevitable result of the very system. Isolated fragments of once flourishing diversity, the last sanctuaries struggling to survive.

3. A lot of Finnish extreme metal carries themes of nature and isolation, but your music feels more like a critique of human systems—anthropocentrism, domination, power. Do you see your work as ecological, anti-humanist, or something even darker?

Devil’s Gateway:
You’ve got the critique right. There is definitely an anti-speciesist and ecofeminist point of view in the stuff we write, trying to express and present the hopelessness and harshness of the reality we’re living in: the downfall and dead end of the anthropocentric, male-dominated world view, ecological collapse and totality of domination, control and colonisation.

4. There’s an undercurrent of despair in your sound, but also defiance. Do you think your music offers a form of resistance—or is it more about staring into the void and naming the rot without sugarcoating it?

Devil’s Gateway:
It surely can, and we definitely advocate the resistance, even if—and probably as—there is no salvation to be gained. The acceptance of the reality surely leaves you disillusioned but it doesn’t mean that you still can’t have integrity and promote the reality you want to live in. Music for us is a way to deal with this rotten world and to give others a view into it, but we don’t preach any easy solutions. Once facing the void one must figure out the answers themselves.

5. Finland is often romanticized as a land of forests and harmony, but you’re coming from a crust/doom/death hybrid that sounds like the collapse of that illusion. How much of that contrast—between the idyllic image and the harsh reality—informs your songwriting?

Devil’s Gateway:
The idyllic image of Finland is unfortunately a myth. There are undeniably some good things in this country, but Finnish connection to nature is definitely a travesty, based on exploitation and control over the non-human world. Yes, the majority of Finnish landscape seems like it’s covered by the forests, but almost all of it is being exploited by the forest industry, with less than 5% of forests being in natural state. The number is a little larger in northern parts, but the romanticized image of northern Finland is unfortunately another marketing trick where the “beautiful winter wonderland” is sold to tourists, at the same time as Sámi people are fighting for their rights for their indigenous land and the international mining companies are welcomed there to do an irreversible damage. And don’t get us started with the Finnish connection to animals… There is no place for wildlife here unless they’re something to be hunted, so almost all of the large carnivores are regularly killed near to extinction, and most of the wildlife is on a decline due to their natural habitats being destroyed. To be a non-human animal in Finland will mostly mean a factory farmed, fearful and painful life. The disgrace of the Finnish fur farming industry is just one example.

Our songwriting is definitely reflecting that contrast and collapse of illusions, and many of our songs deal with it on different levels: the ugly reality of the effects of the human-centered myths and beliefs, deceitful salvation fantasies and divine justification.

6. Your sound feels suffocating, almost oppressive at times. Is that intentional—to recreate the sensation of being trapped in systems we can’t dismantle—or is it just how the music naturally emerges from you?

Devil’s Gateway:
Guess it’s both. This is the kind of music we love and listen to, so it’s been just a matter of time for this kind of a band to emerge from us. But as we’re dealing with the themes we’ve discussed, the music couldn’t be any less suffocating, right?

7. Extreme metal often grapples with death, but your album title suggests life itself is what’s being torn apart. What do you think is being shredded the most in our current moment—community, identity, the planet, something else?

Devil’s Gateway:
It’s the whole of the biological and cultural diversity of life. The grinding destruction, exploitation, suffocation and assimilation have left our world with just the shreds of what used to be, and that process just keeps on accelerating. As human totalitarianism subjects the non-human world to mere resources for the ultimate death machine, only the fragments of the cultural diversity are left from the centuries of repression and assimilation. The expansion of factory farming reflects the reality of natural world’s extinction wave as the growth-obsessed commercialism and monocultural chauvinism result in global mining industry, imperialist warfare and genocide.

8. Some would argue that playing in a niche genre like crust/doom is already a political act because it resists mainstream commodification. Do you agree, or does real resistance demand something more than sound?

Devil’s Gateway:
Kinda depends on what you are fighting for or against. Making art, especially diy ethics within underground has a counterculture aspect to it for sure, and dealing with the critical point of view we’ve been talking about has a political side to it, but at the same time we do not have any kind of political agenda that could be translated straight-forwardly into an effect in the world, unless it’s the aforementioned reality check into the world we’re living in. But of course, especially as many of us have some background in punk, we do acknowledge the underground culture’s and art’s ability to ignite real action in the world too.

9. The album drips with bleak honesty, which can be hard to sustain. How do you personally avoid turning that bleakness inward—burnout, nihilism—or is surrendering to it part of the catharsis?

Devil’s Gateway:
As we are five individuals, everyone deals with it in different ways, some being very cynical, even nihilistic about it all, and some focusing more on promoting the reality they want. But as the very nature of art isn’t just to bluntly state the facts or opinions, but to challenge the everyday experience and the personal bias, creating music is at same time a result of one’s conflict with that bleakness and also a way to succumb to it and reach out beyond the personal experience.

10. Thank you again for sharing your time and vision with us. Is there anything you’d like to add—something listeners should understand about Shreds of Life or the world it came from?

Devil’s Gateway:
Thank you for the good questions! Maybe it is good to end this with the lyric part of the title track: