Ville Valo confirms Neon Noir tracklist, cover and release date

We’ve got two lots of epic news for you today: as well as putting him on the cover of this week’s Kerrang!, the mighty Ville Valo has officially confirmed all the details of his debut solo album under the name VV.

The iconic former HIM frontman is set to release the cooly-titled Neon Noir on January 13 via Heartagram Records, distributed by UMG/ Spinefarm. He describes it as “a sonic step-by-step guide on how to survive, and perhaps even enjoy, the realm of VV with its abundance of things that go bump in the night.

“It’s a teary mascara marathon between Robert Smith and Ozzy, with a dash of hope.”

The tracklist is as follows:

1. Echolocate Your Love
2. Run Away From the Sun
3. Neon Noir
4. Loveletting
5. The Foreverlost
6. Baby Lacrimarium
7. Salute the Sanguine
8. In Trenodia
9. Heartful of Ghosts
10. Saturnine Saturnalia
11. Zener Solitaire
12. Vertigo Eyes

And the album cover looks like this:

Telling Kerrang! about how this all ended up a solo project, Ville reveals: “I always wanted to work on music, but I really didn’t want to put together a new band. It just felt like something I honestly don’t want to do, because 25-plus years [in HIM] was a lot. And there’s a lot of love for that band. It just didn’t feel right.”

Meanwhile, of the experience of putting it all together during COVID, he shares: “It enabled me to be in a creative space, or a meditative space, for more or less two years. I wasn’t thinking about anything else besides the album from the morning until I went to sleep. God bless my girlfriend for her patience. It’s hard to put into words but it was very intense, and it was like a journey into yourself. It makes you relearn what you appreciate, and relearn the little subtleties in music that make the world go around. That make my world go around.”

Pre-order Neon Noir now.

Read this: Ville Valo: “It’s a continuation of what I’ve done in the past and what might happen next”