Hate, Dominate, Congregate, Eliminate
About the recording
There’s a huge studio report available for this album, so check that one out for even more details. The strongest memories from the studio are all the friends being there all the time, drinking beer, some of them doing backing vocals and whatnot. Except for when K and Petter did the bass and guitars there were people all over the place, taking part in the recording progress. Another good memory is when a close friend entered the studio as K and Petter had just put down the 4 rhythm-guitars and says “- That’s a great bass sound!”. Only problem with that statement is that he bass hadn’t been recorded yet at that point.
This album introduced Jo Enckell to the Haters after the dismissal of Mia Ståhl. The owner of Soundlab Studios, the late Mieszko, did his one of his best productions ever here with a bass sound bands can only dream of. It was a lovely recording with a bit of a stressed mixing. Something around 20 days in total were spent in Soundlab Studios and after that recording we felt that we have peaked. This album is still a gigantic monument for us and holds a very special place in our hearts.
About the title
We thought about a lot of stuff but nothing really appealed to K in a way that was needed, so we started to ask around on our then-forums for some suggestions, just for fun. A Canadian Hater, Derek Hamilton, came up with the title to 90%. Can’t remember what the initial “E” word in the title was, but K didn’t approve of it and changed it to “Eliminate” and there it was: the title for the album. Then we based the song titles around the album title and for the first time we used one word titles throughout the whole album.
About the cover
Marko Saarelainen had completely free hands to do what he wanted. His friend, Jouni Väänänen, took a lot of photos and Marko played around with them to make the cover what it eventually became. A great move was to make the cover in the color it is as it throws you completely off-guard and sure makes it stand out among the million of anonymous album covers around.