Two years ago, HIM released their last album. Then they just…disappeared. No gigs, no website, no news, no nothing. Enough mystery, we say. We sent Ian Winwood to catch up with Ville Valo and find out what’s going on with the Goth metal superstars…

 Should you have had to cause to mutter darkly and pull your collar to the cold and damp of a bracing spell of frigid English weather during the past two weeks, then spare a thought for Ville Valo. At 5am on the morning of Thursday February 2nd, the 35-year-old singer was hard at work with a hairdryer. Even by the most exacting measurement of hair quality - known officially as the Bonjoviometer - Ville Valo is possessed of a head of the finest hair. But at dawn on a Finnish morning in darkest February, the HIM frontman was not preening but surviving.

 “The temperature was well below minus 20 degrees,” he says, “and my pipes had frozen. So there I was, at five o’clock in the morning, holding a hairdryer up to the pipes in the hope that I could defrost them; a) so I could get some heat back on, and b) to try to stop the pipes from bursting. If anyone thinks that being a singer in a rock band is all about the glamour, they should have seen me this morning.”

Well, as it happens, it’s been quite some time since people have seen Ville Valo do anything. This month it will be two full years since the Scandinavian group – of which Ville is very much the public face – released Screamworks: Love in Theory and Practice, their seventh and most recent album. Despite attaining top 30 status in no fewer than 14 countries, its authors found themselves released from their record contract with Warner Brothers (the impolite term is ‘dropped’) and thus in a state of commercial limbo.

Speaking of dropped, this is exactly what the group has done: dropped out of sight. 2011 saw virtually no activity from HIM at all, odd from a frontman as photogenic as Scarlett Johansson and as quotable as Oscar Wilde. To accompany the visual and sonic silence, there followed an electronic one: HIM’s website, the source of all firsthand news, for anyone who loves the group’s brand of ‘love metal’, was also closed down.

The only thing that seemed to be missing from the picture was a sign on the front door saying ‘Out Of Business.’ It begs the question: What the hell has happened to HIM?

“I know that things have been really quiet of late,” says Ville. (By the way, he really does use phrases such as ‘of late’. Despite being born in Finland, this is a man with an accent that could both cut glass and grace the red benches of the House of Lords.) “But our drummer [Gas Lipstick] has suffered a music-related injury – at least that’s what he says it is. He has nerve damage and it’s been a problem for about a year now; obviously it’s been terrible for him, but it’s also been stressful for the rest of the group. You can’t make rock music without a drummer.”

The promising news is that the prognosis of Gas’ nerve damage is not as bad as it might be, and the band hopes to reconvene soon in their rehearsal room in order to write music for their eighth studio album. The bad news is that don’t have a record label on which to release this album.

“The thing with Warners is really a kind of a familiar story,” says the group’s leader. “When we signed with [the label] there were lots of people there who really loved the band, loved what we were doing; people who worked hard for us and who really had our best interests at heart. And now, of course, all of those people have left the company. So instead we had a bunch of people that we didn’t know, who didn’t know us, and who we felt didn’t really understand what we are about and how to best represent us.

“All of a sudden, it felt like we didn’t have a home any more,” he says. “It was time for use to move on.”

But move on to where, and when, and how? The first time Ville Valo was profiled in a feature in this magazine, he sat alone on a dilapidated, fly-tipped settee on a street in London’s gritty Finsbury Park. Since those days, his group’s always-melodic sound has become shinier and more polished, as have the surroundings in which the Finn finds himself. The man with dorsal fin cheekbones gave up his eighty a day cigarette habit – he may have looked as dreamy as a character from the Twilight series, but he stank of fags – as well as eschewing alcohol. In his professional life, things also took a surge for the better: the venues became larger – in 2007 HIM were the main support to Metallica at that band’s night at Wembley Stadium – and the frontman’s face became a regular fixture on the cover of this magazine.

And now? Well now he’s fixing his pipes with a hairdryer at five in the morning.

“Am I worried about our standing and our profile?” he asks, in response to exactly that question. “I don’t know, you tell me – should I be worried? This break we’ve had has had its benefits, in that it’s made me think about where we were going as a band. That’s why I shut down [the website], because it was becoming too commercial, it was becoming just about selling t-shirts.

“There seems to be very little mystique in music at the moment,” he continues. “And I really miss that. I want to recapture some sense of mystique, if I can. I want to make music that goes back to when we were directly influenced by Black Sabbath, which I can imagine would have been very confusing to the people who work at Warner Brothers and who would be complaining that they couldn’t get this played on the radio. Who cares? I don’t. I’d like the album to be released on Rise Above [the cult, underground doom metal label owned by Cathedral singer Lee Dorrian]. I think that would be great. We could get it back to being just about the music, about the mystique; we’ll get back into people’s faces in the best possible way and remind them exactly what we’re capable of.”

HIM hope to be back in the public’s line of vision at some point this year. In an ideal world, the group will perform concerts – possibly festivals – in the summer, and will release their eighth studio album by the time the nights have drawn in. Whether or no the band’s profile will have diminished in their absence is a question waiting to be answered. What seems to be without doubt, though, is that (at least in the eyes of their singer) HIM will return rawer, rarer, and purer than they have been for many a long year.