Finnish hardcore punk SEURAT return with new political album about collapse, care, and the possibilities of flesh

Formed in 2018 after a coffee meeting in Oulu, Seurat began as a political hardcore punk project driven by frustration and the desire to imagine otherwise. From their first gig at a lakeside DIY fest in Kainuu to tours across Europe, their approach has remained anchored in anarchist poetics, bodily resistance, and the search for new modes of living. This year they release Lihan uusi runousoppi (“New Poetics of the Flesh”)—their fourth release and second album.

It’s a work shaped by collective survival. “The language and form of the album explores flesh as malleable, vulnerable and resistant,” the band states, “an entity and principle that bears the marks of oppressive power, while seeking new ways to exist.” The songs wrestle with the marks left by domination, but insist on staying open to care, transformation, and rebellion.

The band, featured in our in-depth feature about Kirot, Nuusa (vocals), Minna (guitar), Jani (guitar), Jere (bass), and Niku (drums), worked with Mikko Heikkinen at Haukka-studio to record and mix the album (he will also temporarily replace Minna on the upcoming Eurotour). It was mastered by Will Killingsworth at Dead Air Studios.

Like their earlier works, the record is steeped in Finnish punk’s rawness and reflexivity, but its message extends beyond borders. Guest appearances include Laua RIP, Vellu (Hero Dishonest), Eetu (Qwälen), Lassi (Ystävälliset terveiset), Maria (Vivisektio), and Minna (Random Crashes ).

The band will hit the road with Korupuhe this May for a European tour including gigs in Poland, the Baltics, and central Europe.

The first show kicks off in Tampere as a #punkstoo support gig—a movement that has reshaped Finnish punk since 2021 and which Seurat has been vocal about. “There is still a huge amount of work,” they say, “and we would like to see men, especially those involved in the scene, take more visible responsibility.”

The album’s central themes are embodied in its title. Flesh here is neither pure nor abject—it is a porous, posthuman space. “The lyrics try to embody language, unfix meaning, and open the listener to a dynamic understanding of being,” the band explains. “In this vision, vulnerability is not weakness, but openness; interdependence and mutual care emerge, resisting the neoliberal fantasy of the self as competitive and closed.”

Several tracks explore these ideas with piercing clarity.

In Ratkeaa liitoksistaan (“The Rupture”), Nuusa frames collapse as generative: “It is a poetic vision of collapse—not as mere destruction, but as a rupture that makes space for something else to emerge.” The song is fragmented and vocal-heavy, opening with a whisper from Laua RIP before launching into a screamed chorus that questions narrative control: “Do you hear it? Do you hear it?” Minna echoes the cry. The song’s imagery of twisted bones, leaking stories, and knowledge in decay points to a world unraveling, but not lost—merely reconfigured.

Mies vs. Mies (“Man Against Man”) dismantles the architecture of masculinity through irony and ritualistic repetition. “The lyrics are deceptively simple,” Nuusa says, “but this minimalism holds a mirror up to the violence and absurdity of socially constructed masculinity.” Inspired in part by a hockey match announcement and political rhetoric, the song highlights how systemic male violence is framed as natural, sanctioned, and even noble. “The cycle of destruction creates itself,” the track insists.

Itketään ja kiristellään (“Weeping and Gnashing Teeth”) began with a dream. Nuusa recalls, “This song is a journey through grief, refusal, and quiet rebirth.” A shift occurs halfway: “to rise because of pain.” The song ultimately embraces radical stillness and non-heroic survival—tending soil, staying put, and building meaning in the cracks.

Uusi liha (“The New Flesh”) is a meditation on bodily breakdown. “Flesh is not sacred or whole—it is breaking down, glitching, reassembling itself beyond recognition.” The chorus asks, “A hagiography or a true crime?”—only to answer, “no one wonders at new flesh.” This indifference becomes critique: the transformation of bodies, often miraculous or horrifying, is dismissed because it no longer serves dominant systems. “The most important thing is that this flesh, emerging from trauma or mutation, is radically free,” Nuusa adds.

Häkä (“Carbon Monoxide”) takes a different route. “The central metaphor—‘most arsonists suffocate in the carbon monoxide of their own actions’—cuts both ways,” Nuusa says. It critiques both oppressive systems and resistance movements that risk mirroring their enemies. Still, something stirs in the smoke. “Clarity arrives not through daylight but through night. The brightness in darkness suggests that when false lights are extinguished, true sight emerges.”

Kaarna (“Bark”) draws from the forest as metaphor and material. “Your flesh is bark, the bark reshapes itself.” This song enacts the porous boundary between body and nature. “The disorientation caused by the forest is not a threat but a passage,” Nuusa says. The pact with the woods resists fixed identity. Roots speak. Paths shift with whispers.

Tuntemattomat maastot (“Unknown Terrains”) begins with “light splits everything”—a critique of surveillance and knowledge regimes. From here, new terrains emerge. “The body reconfigures; time stitches into flesh.” By the end, the listener is urged to “imagine new map symbols.” The refusal to define becomes a method of mapping.

Liike ei lakkaa (“Movement Does Not Cease”) rejects settledness. “Brightness does not come from above,” Nuusa explains, “but from the roots, from the ground, from the margins.” The song honors vulnerability and migration—not as chaos, but as ethics. Tents, not houses. Wrinkles, not smooth systems.

The final track, Vierii (“Rolling”), tackles the illusion of certainty. Nuusa, also a historian, reflects: “I have also noticed in myself a tendency to want to ‘predict’ future events and thus to place myself sometimes morally above the zeitgeist. I don’t like this.” The song abandons the prophetic voice. “The collapse of old orders makes space for new possibilities—and for a freedom still rolling forward.”

The record closes with a poem:

The spasm of meaning tears the whole body out of the body
and leaves the carcass in the cave
Not a man nor any other species
the Being forgets its limits, thinks nothing is impossible
Moves in its sublime otherness, creates a new earth

Seurat’s new poetics—of flesh, collapse, care, and refusal—aren’t about revolution as spectacle. They’re about what comes after: a weed growing through concrete, a whisper in a forest, a map written in ash.

Lihan uusi runousoppi Ripping Spring Tour date with Korupuhe:

 

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9.5. Vastavirta, Tampere FI
10.5. Adminy 4, Riga, LV
11.5. XI20, Vilnius, LT
13.5. Vegalite, Brno, CZ
14.5. Gustaf Pekarna, Maribor, SI
15.5. Kapu, Linz, AT
16.5. Westside, Neumarkt, DE
17.5. Pampa, Coesfeld, DE
18.5. Köpi, Berlin, DE
19.5. Ask a punk, Copenhagen, DK

Summer shows:

7.6. Tukikohta, Oulu, FI
14.6. Kramsu, Jyväskylä, FI
5.7. Hässäkkäpäivät-festival, Oulu, FI
26.7. Qstock-festival, Oulu, FI
5.9. Seiväs, Kouvola, FI
6.9. Rytmikorjaamo, Seinäjoki, FI

Check out the full detailed track by track commentary below.

Lihan uusi runousoppi

Lihan uusi runousoppi (”The New Poetics of the Flesh”) explores the flesh—”liha”—not as a static or singular entity, but as a fluid, generative site where vulnerability, perception, resistance, and transformation collide. The form of the album and its lyrics delve into flesh as shared and unstable, a connective tissue between individuals and their environments, between the conscious and the material. It positions the body not as a stable site of identity but as an ever-transforming field of experience. It dismantles binaries and replaces them with porous, shifting connections.

The lyrics try to embody language, unfix meaning, and open the listener to a dynamic understanding of being. In doing so, the whole album enacts a feminist, posthuman, and radically ethical poetics—one that insists that every rupture in the flesh is also a possibility for a new world. In this vision, vulnerability is not weakness, but openness; interdependence and mutual care emerge, resisting the neoliberal fantasy of the self as competitive and closed.

Lihan uusi runousoppi refuses the mind/body split, dismantling the logic of control, surveillance, and domination that has historically policed racialized, gendered, and disabled bodies. Instead, flesh becomes a utopian language—imperfect, unstable, alive—a medium for imagining liberated ways of being without replicating oppressive structures. To be flesh, in this collection, is to be with others, not separate from them. It is to live in the constant movement of becoming, in the fragility that makes connection possible, and in the creative potential of rupture. In the world of Lihan uusi runousoppi, flesh is not a prison, but an anarchic space of transformation—always unfinished, always starting anew.

RATKEAA LIITOKSISTAAN (“the Rupture”)

Nuusa: It is a poetic vision of collapse—not as mere destruction, but as a rupture that makes space for something else to emerge. Deeply anarchist in tone and form, the song dismantles the idea of coherent systems—language, identity, nationhood, power—and embraces the fragmented, the marginal, the silenced. In this disintegration, there is a whisper of a new world, not yet shaped, but already in motion. And this is also the reason why the song begins with an almost apocalyptic whisper by Laua Rip. (rap, post-witch house).

The song itself is very simple in form but the lyrics and people who come and join the screaming and singing makes it multilayered. This was originally going to be the last track on the album, but Mikko H. suggested we move it to the first and we think that was the right decision.

When the screaming starts the lines translates somewhat to “a trout slides down a throat – giving up its story – finally speaking, but within the mouths of others”. This is supposed to capture the essence of alienated expression. In a world built on domination, even our voices are ventriloquized by systems—capital, empire, inherited trauma.

It suggests a break in narrative control, where suppressed stories begin to leak out through unorthodox channels. It also speaks of decay and decentralization of knowledge where mold, pests, living beings—these are not just metaphors of decay, but of unruly, nonhuman life reclaiming space.

In contrast to rigid order and sterile control, these organisms thrive at the margins, feeding on ruins. Here, “centrifugal force” disperses knowledge outward—away from a centralized, imperial core and toward those who move between continents, identities, and realities. Instead, the song suggests a rhizomatic spreading of knowledge, shaped by displacement, exile, migration—a tapestry made not of borders but of motion.

Here even bones, the most rigid structures of the body, are “twisting into place.” This is not healing in the traditional sense—it’s a restructuring. The “knots of the networks of the overlooked” are built from dust—often ignored, swept away. But here, dust becomes material, something to weave a new social fabric from.

The chorus asks if you can hear the rupture but also whose collapse is this even? To some, the end of capitalism, empire, or patriarchy feels like the end of the world. But to others, to the dispossessed, the excluded, the silenced—it is a beginning. Not a fall, but a bursting open.

The repeated “kuuletko kuuletko” (“Do you hear it”) demands attention: this rupture is not silent. It’s audible, physical, historic. It shakes the foundations not just of institutions, but of the stories we tell about who owns collapse, who survives it, and who rises from it. And the chorus is echoed with a cry of Minna from Random Crashes.

This song is not about despair but more like a blueprint written in ash and breath, a whispered vision of a world in the making—not on the ruins of the old, but from within its seams. It doesn’t romanticize suffering, but it refuses to see it as the end. Instead, the seams splitting open allow air to rush in. What once was hidden, becomes audible. What once was discarded, becomes foundation. The collapse is not just an ending. It’s an opening. Do you hear it?

MIES VS. MIES (“Man against Man”)

Nuusa: This song is a minimalist yet a sonic critique of the entire architecture of masculine violence and thus toxic masculinity.

The lyrics are deceptively simple—almost ritualistic in repetition—but this minimalism holds a mirror up to the violence and absurdity of socially constructed masculinity. Through an ironic tone, the song deconstructs the toxic codes of masculinity that glorify competition, suppression of emotion, and the fetishization of violence.

It begins in my mind with an image of two men standing in a Finnish national romantic landscape of a late 19th century painting, which underlines the irony of the song. The song stages masculine aggression as a performance, as a spectacle, almost like a cinematic showdown.—two men poised in a desolate landscape, enacting a familiar script of sanctioned violence. Lines like “sokea voima, luvallinen väkivalta” (“blind force, authorized violence”) highlight how society legitimizes aggression through sports, war, and authority, making male-on-male combat seem natural, even noble.

I find it at once quite amusing and yet symptomatically horrifying that I picked up the title of this song when I was at a hockey match where the announcer was talking about the start of a penalty shoot-out, how it was “man against man”. Later, with the election of Trump, in a policy debate about Russia’s war in Ukraine, there was discussion of how Trump was trying to thwart European efforts at peace talks and just wanted to be with Putin “man against man”.

There are many places where I mock the absurd need for men to constantly prove their worth through dominance. The song reveals this cycle of violence as self-generating—“tuhon kierre luo itse itsensä” (“the cycle of destruction creates itself”)—a system sustained by its own momentum, not by necessity. At its core it tries to expose how masculinity, as traditionally defined, functions as a tool of control and division.

It implies that patriarchal violence is not just accidental or reactionary—it is systemic, generative, and deeply embedded. In anarchist terms, this line points to the way hierarchical systems manufacture conflict to maintain power. The system thrives on division, competition, and control. By refusing to romanticize male violence, it calls for a new way of being—one that rejects the script and embraces connection over competition.

ITKETÄÄN JA KIRISTELLÄÄN (“Weeping and gnashing teeth”)

Nuusa: I heard the chorus line which is also the name of the song in a dream and built the lyrics around it. This song is a journey through grief, refusal, and quiet rebirth. Through stark imagery and haunting repetition, the song traces a journey from emotional collapse to radical transformation—not through revolution per se, but through leaving, letting go, and beginning again. The song reflects on the importance of various resistance tactics and on a kind of vita activa and vita contemplativa in relation to oneself and the world.

The narrator of the story is in pain and tired of the world and dreams of moving to the edge of the world and building their own little utopia there, away from everything else. There is also a reference to the (extreme) right-wing government’s policy of cutting in current Finnish society, as the narrator of the song does not intend to pack ‘even one pair of scissors’ when they move.

However, in part c of the song, there is a turnaround in which the attitude of the narrator changes. The turning point comes with: “to rise because of pain.” Not despite it, but because of it. It’s a hard-won emergence—a becoming forged in sorrow.

And in the end, the decision to stay in the broken world, to plant and to feel, becomes its own act of resistance. There are some thoughts about radical stillness where in the final turn, the speaker chooses not to escape but to remain. It traces a journey out of the ashes of despair—not toward perfection, but toward a new kind of living. It’s a slow, quiet, radical anarchism: the anarchism of tending soil, naming hurt, dismantling inherited ghosts, and building meaning from nothing.

It recognizes that the world is cracked and grief-stricken—and insists on making something anyway. It grows out of nihilism like a weed through concrete. Not heroic, not clean, but alive.

UUSI LIHA (” the New Flesh”)

Nuusa: This song is a fragmented meditation on bodily transformation, collapse, and emergence. It rejects fixed identities and stable forms, instead embracing the body as a site of glitch, decay, and radical possibility. Here, flesh is not sacred or whole—it is breaking down, glitching, reassembling itself beyond recognition. Jani and I was listening to György Ligeti’s Metamorphoses and I asked him to use that as an inspiration while making the song.

The song begins with a rupture: “contact error.” This is more than lost intimacy—it’s a failure of the systems meant to connect us. As “bones become brittle,” the body dissolves its old architecture, not in defeat, but as a refusal of the roles it once served. The recurring image of “new flesh” is neither miracle nor tragedy—it’s something strange, unclassifiable, and free from the binaries of saint or sinner, victim or villain. I saw the poetic images of these lyrics in a dream one night and tried to put them into words here.

Through vivid and raw textures, the body becomes terrain: irritated, elemental, alive. In this friction lies liberation. Not polished transcendence, but transformation in the dust and fragments. But the most important is the question in the chorus “A hagiography or a true crime?” and its answer, whichever way you look at it, “no one wonders at new flesh”. This refrain is cuttingly ironic.

The transformation of flesh—potentially miraculous, potentially horrific—is met with apathy. The world, numb from overexposure, no longer distinguishes between sacred and profane, salvation and spectacle. In this collapse of meaning lies an anarchist critique of media, religion, and moral binaries. The “new flesh” defies classification. It is no longer useful to systems of control, so it is dismissed. But this flesh, emerging from trauma or mutation, is radically free—it doesn’t need to be understood to be powerful.

 

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HÄKÄ (“Carbon Monoxide”)

Nuusa: Through elemental imagery, the song confronts the illusions of safety, the toxicity of power, and the paradoxical clarity that arises in the aftermath of destruction.

There’s erosion and exposure while the myth of safety dissolves. The imagery becomes visceral. The skin—our barrier against the world—grows thin. The environment itself becomes abrasive, exposing the rawness of lived experience in a system that no longer protects. But the pain here is not just suffering; it is a process of awakening. The stripping away of layers mirrors a rejection of social conditioning, of the false armors we wear in systems of hierarchy. In this context it is about feeling everything again—allowing exposure, vulnerability, and raw perception to replace numb compliance.

The song’s central metaphor—“most arsonists suffocate in the carbon monoxide of their own actions”—cuts both ways: systems of control collapse under their own toxicity, and acts of resistance risk self-destruction. Yet there’s also irony. The “arsonist”—might be a metaphor for revolutionaries, saboteurs, or even the state itself—creates conditions they cannot survive. Häkä is a byproduct of incomplete combustion, of fire that burns without resolution. It’s poison that kills silently, without flame. Systems of oppression often implode on their own toxicity, unable to escape the fumes of their own violence. And sometimes, resistance movements must reckon with this too—facing the danger of becoming what they sought to destroy.

The guitar solo leads to new ways of knowing(!) : Out of the smoke—not clear air, but confusion and residue—something new begins to form. This isn’t idealistic rebirth; it’s ambiguous, hazy, even spectral. But it’s something, and that is enough. In anarchist philosophy, this is akin to prefiguration: the act of embodying new, free forms of living even in the ruins of the old.

In the final lines, clarity arrives not through daylight but through night. The brightness in darkness suggests that when false lights are extinguished, true sight emerges. The clearest path is not through obedience, but through unmaking, through burning, through stepping into the unknown.

 

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KAARNA (“Bark”)

Nuusa: Kaarna is an immersion into wildness, disorientation, and transformation. It resists control with roots, whispers, and wild entanglements. It’s liberation grown from the soil—shapeless, alive, and deeply free.

Beneath dreamlike imagery lies a radical critique of order and a fierce embrace of the wild—both literal and symbolic. These words can be read as a poetic manifesto of liberation, where the forest becomes a metaphor for rejecting imposed structures and embracing chaos, fluidity, and non-human agency.

Opening reveals a deep intimacy between the narrator and the forest, where the narrator has a pact with the paths—an alliance that defies human logic or control. The idea thatpaths themselves can be moved by whisper suggests a world unbound by physical laws or social expectations.

“lihasi kaarna, kaarna muovautuu”
“your flesh is bark, the bark reshapes itself”

This transformative line in chorus tries to blur the boundary between human and nature, suggesting that our bodies are not separate from the forest but part of its ever-shifting form. The image of bark as flesh subverts the human-centric worldview and offers a non-anthropocentric vision where identity is porous and mutable.

Here, the forest is not just a setting but an active force—one that disrupts sanity as defined by societal norms. The disorientation caused by the forest is not a threat but a passage, a breaking down of self that allows for renewal. It affirms that the journey doesn’t end in despair; rather, it continues, reshaped and untamed.

TUNTEMATTOMAT MAASTOT (“Unknown Terrains”)

Nuusa: It shows a vision where maps, bodies, and truths are unraveled and reimagined. It’s an act of cartographic sabotage, a claiming of the unknown.

In the first lines light becomes violence: “light splits everything” exposes the harm of visibility under systems of control. But from that exposure, something escapes—“sheds its skin,” flees the scene, and chooses care over confrontation. Violent illumination and the tyranny of the visible speaks of the refusal of epistemic authority of who gets to define reality, and whose realities are erased or deformed by that definition.

As the known breaks down, “unknown terrains” grow between—spaces not on any map, yet full of possibility, a radical reworlding. What I think is important here is that the lyrics insist: “nothing is missing.” The unknown, the in-between, the liminal is not absence—it is plenitude.

The body reconfigures; time stitches into flesh; rules of identity and anatomy collapse. With grotesque but powerful bodily reconfiguration. Neck becomes one with a thigh bone—suggesting the disordering of form, a body that no longer obeys the laws of anatomy, nation, or gender. The song ends with a suggestion: Imagine new map symbols. Not only does it dismantle the map, it demands a new one. But not a top-down cartography of conquest—rather, a communal, embodied, uncertain mapping of life as it is lived beyond borders, binaries, and coordinates.

LIIKE EI LAKKAA (“Movement Does Not Cease”):

Nuusa: This song is a declaration of constant transformation, collective vulnerability, and resistance to containment. It begins with a statement of endless migration—not just human, but planetary, existential, cosmic. This is not just about moving from one place to another; it’s about undoing the idea of rootedness as a moral or political good. Settledness—geographic, national, even ideological—is often treated as stability, order, or belonging. But here, the poles themselves shift. The fundamental coordinates of orientation are unreliable.

Brightness does not come from above—from heaven, from authority, from divine revelation. Instead, it rises from below—from the roots, from the ground, from the margins. The image flips traditional hierarchies of power and light. The treetops do not obscure; the forest floor illuminates.

Instead of denying pain, the song invites to acknowledge it as a site of connection and solidarity. Every body—migrant, sick, old, queer, disabled, racialized, undocumented—contains this same luminous mechanism. By saying it is “kirkkaana” (bright), the song refuses the shame attached to fragility. It turns bodily exposure into political light, burning through the myth of the autonomous, hardened subject.

Even the act of folding—a gesture of care or tidiness—contains traces of resistance. The bodies are not outside the folds but hidden within them, disrupting them. Wrinkles become spaces where bodies reside, where systems of order fail to smooth everything over. What I find the song’s most haunting image—body shrouds as tents—fuses death and dwelling. What wraps the dead becomes a site of gathering. The tent, unlike a house, is temporary, mobile, communal. It represents shelter without ownership, safety without exclusion. It is the anti-border, the anti-fence. The song doesn’t advocate chaos for its own sake—it affirms that the only way to live ethically in a violent world is to never stop moving against it, with each other, with tenderness.

“VIERII” (“Rolling”)

Nuusa: Vierii explores the tension between self-awareness and the collapse of fixed narratives, questioning morality, knowledge, and existence itself. It begins with a “moral problem,” rejecting the idea of universal ethics enforced by systems of power. The speaker abandons the role of prophet, embracing the liberating uncertainty of not-knowing—a conscious rejection of predestined paths and imposed truths.

Here I try emphasize the voluntary relinquishment of control over knowledge. By giving up the oracle’s role, the narrator rejects the notion that any person, ideology, or system can hold exclusive access to “truth.”

The decision to “stop reading” and “stop seeing everything in advance” is a radical rejection of predestination, of linear progress, and of static understanding. As a historian, I have also noticed in myself a tendency to want to ‘predict’ future events and thus to place myself sometimes morally above the zeitgeist. I don’t like this and have consciously tried to learn away from it.

That is not to say that I do not think that history and the critical examination of historiography are really important and that I do not think that studying it would open up perspectives for today and perhaps help us as a human race to be careful not to make the same mistakes again and again. But at the same time, in relying on any one discipline, theory or engineering invention, I think we exclude the presence of improbable possibilities and the spiral may also become fatalistic. Thus the idea that liberation comes not from certainty or control but from embracing the chaos and unpredictability of existence is present here.

As the song unfolds, structures fall: towers collapse, shadows rise, and order dissolves into a fertile void. This “pure nothingness” is not despair, but radical possibility.

Images of shadows and hidden movements reflect how real change often rises from the margins, unseen and uncontrollable. By rejecting control and mastery, the song affirms autonomy, emphasizing direct experience over inherited knowledge. In this liminal space, freedom thrives—not in certainty, but in openness to the unknown. The collapse of old orders makes space for new possibilities—and for a freedom still rolling forward.

The record ends with a poem which translates somewhat like this:

The spasm of meaning tears the whole body out of the body
and leaves the carcass in the cave
Not a man nor any other species
the Being forgets its limits, thinks nothing is impossible
Moves in its sublime otherness, creates a new earth