MonDeGos Blind the Rune Singer on Trickster

MonDeGos formed in Helsinki during the first pandemic years, five players looking for a room that isolation could not flatten. Tero Kuusi sings and writes most of the songs. Sami Metelinen brings piano and the one track he authored, Mindless Pictures. Vesa Nupponen holds the low end. Mika Taskinen takes the lead guitar. Martti Viljainen drives the kit. Two EPs marked the first public shape of the band, Bridges in 2024 and Authority in 2025, with club dates at Semifinal, Bar Loose, Playhouse and Boothill. Trickster, released independently on 12 August 2026 through DistroKid, is the first full statement. It was cut at Sonic Pump Studios with Eero Kaukomies on recording and mix, then sent to Jaakko Viitalähde for mastering. Duncan Butt Juvonen made the sleeve.

The sleeve is the first argument. Juvonen works from a photograph of a North Karelian rune singer, taken around the turn of the twentieth century, the kind of plate that once served nation-building more than music. Three black diamonds sit where the eyes should be, and one more where a second face starts to bloom out of the first. The man still has a beard, a robe, a profile built for the archive. He no longer has a gaze. That is the trick. Ethnographers went east to freeze a living tradition into heritage. MonDeGos take the heritage object and stop it from watching you. The rest of Trickster happens in that darkened field of vision.

North Karelia is not a tourist caption here. The band wrote much of this material among forests and long quiet, in the same landscape that fed the Kalevala and the old rune-singing line. The trickster they invoke is older than rock vocabulary. He is the figure who breaks the ritual order, who lies usefully, who changes shape so the story can move. On this record he arrives as a guide, a jester, an inner voice, a man in the trees, a saint who will not answer. The songs do not form a plot so much as a set of rooms with the same furniture rearranged.

Paradise opens like a street already emptied. Distorted guitars stack fast. Kuusi’s voice comes in scraped and urgent, closer to early-2000s alternative muscle than to any polite Nordic indie. The paradise in the chorus is a mirage you keep naming while cold steel burns in the hand. In the Woods thickens the air. The bass pulses, the guitars close in, and a figure lives among the trees as master of the mind. Keep your eyes down, the song repeats, which is almost a stage direction for the cover art. Saints lifts on a melancholy guitar figure, then hits a wider chorus that wants the room to stand up with it. Faith is asked a direct question and left standing there. Dance with me becomes dance with him, a small turn that does more work than a speech would.

Mindless Pictures is the first real change of temperature. A xylophone holds the first six seconds, dry and slightly off to the side of the record so far, then the electric guitars hit. The riff sits dead center in the mix, clean enough to follow with one finger. The vocal eases off the scrape. Metelinen’s writing asks where to aim, then remembers a night of drowning and a possible rescue.

Joker is the mask the press kit points to first, and it earns the pointing. Piano starts it, almost theatrical, before the band swells into a larger, more ceremonial chorus. Take my soul, so you can see the shape of my life. The line is naked to the point of risk. Fear then tightens the screws. Heavier riffs, a martial push, a direct address to the thing that used to walk ahead on the road. Look in my eyes, Kuusi sings, which is funny on an album whose central image has no eyes left. Reason and Relics share more than atmosphere. Both lean on darkroom language, red lights, frames, relics of dreams, a figure asked to stand still for eternity. The doubling is the album’s weakest habit. A trickster can repeat a gesture. A debut cannot afford to reprint a verse and hope the lighting change will hide it.

Bridges strips the electricity back. Acoustic guitar, a tired confession, the last fix, the last song probably stolen. It is the most private writing on the record, and the title does honest work after so much talk of broken lands and empty hands. Author, listed that way on the streaming copies that circulate with the advance, brings the storm back in. Voices call from the trees again. The fall is named as a call. The closer carries the line that stays after the speakers stop: we carry the weight of the sun. Then a blunt promise, almost spoken through the teeth, about getting a life back in order. After an hour of masks, the last human sentence is practical.

What gives Trickster weight is the world around the riffs. Piano and guitar argue in the same room. Viljainen hits with purpose. The mix at Sonic Pump is dense, sometimes too dense, a wall that forgets the value of a single dry vocal. Kuusi sings as if the song might leave without him. That presence is the band’s real instrument. The English lyrics reach for vision and sometimes trip on the reaching. Phrases return across tracks until they start to feel like props moved from one scene to the next. For a record built on shapeshifting, the language could use more disguises.

The photograph still does the sharpest work. A rune singer was once recorded so a nation could claim him. MonDeGos put three black marks on that claim and then play for fifty-odd minutes in the dark they made. You do not need the Kalevala on the bedside table. You need to notice that the ancestor has been blinded on purpose, and that the band would rather be heard than blessed. Trickster is a debut with appetite, uneven control, and a visual idea strong enough to hold the mess together. The next record will tell whether the trickster keeps inventing faces, or only rearranges the same three diamonds.

Follow MonDeGos

Trickster is out now.

Listen: Spotify · SoundCloud

Follow: Instagram · YouTube · Facebook · Official Site