Silmät sulaa finds Pietu Arvola picking up the pieces after his brilliant but unrelentingly sorrowful previous LP and turning, at least in theory, toward the light. “My summer album,” is how he describes it - but this is summer as heatstroke rather than idyll, a season where every bright surface hides something scorched underneath. Composed and produced over two winter months in early 2024, the record bears that contradiction in its very grain: lush, glowing arrangements shot through with unease, like sunlight that’s somehow too close, too white, too loud.

Inside these sun‑kissed soundscapes, the memories that drift up are anything but straightforwardly warm. Arvola threads in recollections of sunburnt skin and the burning of a childhood home, heat exhaustion at an At The Gates show, the smell of melting asphalt, and a bat circling above a hospital bed, swatted mid‑air by a nurse and crushed underfoot. These images never appear as literal samples; instead, they inflect the music’s atmosphere. Strings wilt rather than soar, electronics shimmer like air over tarmac, rhythms stagger as if dehydrated. The sense of “summer” here is both sensual and faintly poisonous, a fever dream where pleasure and threat are inseparable.

The album’s structure underlines this slow tilt from clarity to disorientation. Written in strict chronological order, the pieces on side A move through relatively grounded terrain, threading luscious string motifs and more immediately graspable harmonies. There are moments that feel momentarily open, even hopeful: melodic arcs that seem to promise resolution, harmonies that settle just long enough to suggest a clearing. By contrast, side B spirals into more otherworldly, unstable zones. Pitch wavers, timbres fray, forms loosen; what began as a bid for light gradually reveals itself as something knottier, closer to the complexity Arvola says he ended up finding instead of simple brightness. The record doesn’t so much reject optimism as acknowledge the shadows that cling to it.

A good part of Silmät sulaa’s strangeness lies in its toolkit. Among the album’s more experimental instruments is the daxophone, a friction‑driven wooden tongue capable of uncanny, half‑vocal timbres that here flicker between insect, animal and overheated machinery. A dual looper called Cocoquantus is used in tandem with Arvola’s modular synthesizer, capturing and re‑circulating fragments so that textures seem to fold back on themselves, like memories replayed until they blur. In post‑production, certain sections were dubbed to tape and reworked into loops on a reel‑to‑reel recorder, then allowed to unravel and decay, introducing warble, drop‑outs and a slow‑motion sense of disintegration. The result is a sonic language where nothing is entirely solid; everything is slightly melted at the edges.

The imagery surrounding the album extends this molten, feverish logic. The cover shows Arvola and family members entering a cave dwelling late at night somewhere in Cyprus in the early 1990s, a scene that already reads like a childhood myth of coolness and refuge. The title Silmät sulaa (“Eyes melt”) was sparked decades later by a pair of Trolli candy eyeballs bought on a sweltering visit to Genoa’s Cimitero Monumentale di Staglieno, their harrowingly realistic yellow glaze suggesting some internal disease. In memory, cave and candy blur into a single, slowly dissolving vision: a cool, dark chamber behind the eyes where images liquefy under too much heat. The album lives in that overlap, treating sound as a way to re‑enter and remap those melted spaces.

Based in Helsinki, Pietu Arvola is a Finnish sound and experimental video artist with a practice that moves easily between solo work and band contexts. Alongside his earlier LP Meidän täytyy valvoa jottemme nukkuisi, sillä maailma on liukas, he has released two albums under the alias Bereen Ondo and performed solo across Finland and abroad. His noise rock band Musta Huone saw its sophomore album Valosaasteen sekaan (This Is Not A Dog / Paa jotaki, 2023) named Album of the Week and later listed as the sixth best album of 2023 by The Quietus, underscoring his ability to fuse heaviness and atmosphere in more overtly band‑driven forms. Silmät sulaa distils that sensibility into a deeply personal, studio‑bound statement: a “summer album” that understands how close warmth always is to burning, and how memory itself can feel like sun on skin that never quite heals.