History

It all began in 1999. Blind Stare was formed by Anders Öström, Heikki Raisio and Henry Valkonen. Soon after, Tuomas Kant joined the group to play the bass. Until spring 2001, the music style was instrumental metal. Then it was time to move ahead, towards a "real band" status, and so Eino Tuominen joined the band as a vocalist. The musical style evolved more into death metal. Fall 2001 Zacharias E. Aarnio joined the band to play the keyboards, and the music developed towards more epic style.

Suddenly the motivation of some band members begun to drop down. No rehearsals in months. It was a dead season in the band's history. Anders, Eino and Zacharias decided to put an end to that silence and the result was that Henry, Heikki and Tuomas had to go. It was a kick-start for Blind Stare's new musical journey. Jaakko joined Blind Stare and the band got a new rehearsal place in the newcomer's garage. The band was still in need of a drummer and a bass player. After a while, Timo Palokankare and Kalle Lahti joined the group to fill these positions.

October 2002 Blind Stare recorded a demo-CD 'Ender'. It was the first record made with this line-up. Although the sounds weren't that great, it was a significant milestone in the band's history. New, better songs just kept coming with some live performances on the side. The band had now a hunger to record more, to do everything better.

August 2003. 'Once a True Story' demo was recorded and published. With it the band started to get some underground reputation, good reviews and also more gig offers. New songs were coming up, sounding more and more coherent and fresh. Between May and August 2004 the band recorded a new demo entitled 'The Reborn Genius' (demo of the month in a well-known Finnish metal website Imperiumi.net).

In October 2004 Blind Stare signed a contract with Arise Records, which led to the recordings of the debut album titled 'Symphony of Delusions' at the Noisecamp / Musamuusa studios. Blind Stare had created a fresh package of melodic death metal with orchestral and synthetic sound worlds. The CD illustrations were done by Jan Yrlund from Danse Macabre. 'SoD' got many great reviews and sold quite nicely worldwide.

Again, Blind Stare faced another quiet era in its history when Timo, Kalle, Jaakko and Zacharias had to go through their mandatory military service. The year was 2005 and except for few gigs in Turku, nothing happened. During this period the band was preparing new songs for the second album Arise Recods was about to publish. But something happened, and Arise Records wasn't able to release any more new albums. So, the record contract had to be canceled which was a great disappointment to Blind Stare. But like the old saying goes, "What does not kill you only makes you stronger". And Blind Stare surely didn't die!

In 2006 Zacharias called it a quit. Blind Stare wasn't one of his top priorities any more, and he decided not to continue further. However, this decision didn't affect the personal chemistries between him and the other band members. In the year 2007 Tuomas found us and joined Blind Stare with great enthusiasm and boy did that serve us well!

The long waiting ended when 'Promo 2009 / Demo 2009' was released to media and few chosen pieces ended up on our website in August. The year 2010 was a dividing line for the band. Kalle decided to leave the band, and Blind Stare had to find a new Bass player. When Ossi Elonen joined the band, the pre-production of the second full-length album had already been started, and the guy got just right in the middle of the process. In December 2010, the recordings of the 2nd album were done, and the mixing sessions at Noisecamp studio took place at the beginning of the year 2011. The second album 'The Divinding Line' was released in July 2012 by Inverse Records.

(band information updated in December 2017)
(discography updated in December 2017)