OZ

Oz's 1983 album Fire in the Brain marked Finland's breakthrough entry into the worldwide heavy metal landscape, earning widespread praise from both critics and listeners for a group otherwise hampered by frequent lineup shifts and uneven stylistic direction. Formed in 1977 in the tiny town of Nakkila around frontman the Oz, whose birth name was Eero Hämälainen, the band remained largely unknown until its first full-length effort, HM Heroes, appeared in 1982 on the Swedish indie label Tyfon Grammofon.

The personnel at that stage consisted of guitarist Kari Elo, bassist Tauno Vajavaara, and drummer Mark Ruffneck, also known as Pekka Mark; only Ruffneck stayed on board when the group delivered Fire in the Brain the following year. That lineup also featured vocalist Ape De Martini, born Tapani Anselm, guitarists Speedy Foxx and Spooky Wolff (Jurki Taipele), and bassist Jay C. Blade, previously Jukka Homi of Sarcofagus. The record reinvented Oz as a fierce, contemporary metal unit drawing heavily from the unpolished energy of the New Wave of British Heavy Metal, while its playfully garish artwork, along with the single "Turn the Cross Upside Down," was created by Quorthon, later the driving force behind Bathory, whose father ran the band's label.

Later efforts such as 1984's III Warning and 1986's Decibel Storm, both tracked after the band moved to Stockholm, reflected creative inertia and a drop in visual and sonic quality. Supporters turned away in large numbers, prompting a split or extended pause that lasted until 1991, when De Martini and Ruffneck assembled a fresh, mostly Swedish lineup with guitarist Michael Lundholm, bassist Fredrik Thörnblom, and keyboardist Jörgen Schelander to cut the fifth album, Roll the Dice. Another long absence stretched nearly twenty years until Ruffneck reassembled the group in 2011 with Jay C. Blade, Ape De Martini, Costello Hautamäki, and Markku Petander for Burning Leather, which mixed five new songs with six updated versions of earlier material. In 2017 the band issued Transition State on AFM Records, its first collection of entirely new original songs since 1991.