Iceland has Björk. Sweden has ABBA, Yung Lean and Drain Gang. Even neighbouring Estonia has breakout PC Music rap star Tommy Cash. However, to this day, most people outside of the country would be hard-pressed to name a Finnish artist. This fact is painfully clear to all involved in its music scene, and forms the driving force behind the first ever edition of Helsinki Music Week, launched last month (May 2025). 

“In many ways, the Finnish music scene is an underdog,” says Laura Jonsson, DJ and PR-slash-music export specialist for Helsinki’s PME Records. “We’ve been overshadowed by our neighbours, but I feel [it’s created] an intensity in our electronic music scene. There’s only so much incredible music you can make without the rest of the world knowing about it.”

Talking over dinner in north Helsinki’s Restaurant Wino, Jonsson speaks with a passion that clearly goes beyond just professional commitment. She reaches over multiple guests at the table to get her point across – spreading her arms wide to illustrate the breadth of Finnish talent, and explaining that Helsinki was blessed with numerous high-quality music venues at a time when nearby Iceland is suffering a nightlife crisis. “I don’t want to take what we have in Helsinki for granted,” she concludes.

For Jonsson (who also DJs “leftfield and whimsical electronic music” under the name Krash Bandicute), it is Finland’s electronic artists in particular that represent a bright future for the country. While, historically, what little recognition Finnish music has received has gone solely to its metal scene – the likes of Amorphis and Nightwish – the recent rise of experimental electronic duo Amnesia Scanner has demonstrated a new route to success for young Fins today. 

“They’re very similar communities; we’re equally obsessed with subgenres and both scenes are great coping mechanisms for nine months of darkness and cold,” Jonsson explains of the overlaps between metal and electronic music. “I’ve always found it funny that the two couldn’t be successful at the same time. I think: ‘if one person wins, everyone wins!’” 

This latter point speaks to a philosophy that was prevalent across Helsinki Music Week as a whole: the Finnish concept of talkoot (‘working together’). The event was built through contributions from the state and independent record labels and, throughout the week, representatives of the government-funded Music Finland organisation spoke proudly about the country’s wealth of underground music venues and obscure young talent. Within this seemed to be an understanding that working together would be beneficial to artists, labels and the country as a whole – a lesson that places like the UK could do well to listen to.

So, in the spirit of talkoot, below, we spotlight five Finnish electronic artists you need to listen to.

AMNESIA SCANNER

Finland-born and Berlin-based, there’s a deep lore that surrounds experimental electronic duo Amnesia Scanner. Their most recent double-LP Hoax features AI narration, ear-buzzing remixes via AirPods’ noise-cancelling function and a music video consisting solely of a troll doll head attached to an aerial drone, but these aren’t the reasons that the duo are the brightest lights in Finnish electronic music today. Amnesia Scanner have made their name through masterfully deconstructing club sonics, reconstituting four-on-the-floor bass pulses and lead melodies into an artistic comment on the digital age. 

PEHMOAINO

Someone once told me that Fins in particular understand the power of silence, and alt-pop star pehmoaino represents this perfectly. Opening Helsinki Music Week in the capital’s beautiful stone-carved Temppelliaukiou Church-slash-music-venue, there’s a fragility in pehmoaino’s vocals and delicate piano melodies that speaks to the sweeping expansiveness of the Finnish landscape. 

First emerging at age 13 as the winner of Finland’s The Voice Kids talent show, the now-23-year-old has since starred in domestic TV production Kaikki Sinnit and secured a top spot on the Finnish charts with her 2024 debut album Soittorasia (‘Music Box’), pehmoaino is one of the biggest names in the country right now. She’s also currently dating Finland’s foremost rapper MELO, which makes the duo somewhat of the Beyoncé and JAY-Z of the Arctic Circle.

PEARLY DROPS

Electronic dream pop duo Pearly Drops’ latest single “Mermaid” opens with a nostalgic guitar loop before diving into a cascade of sequenced drums and ethereal vocals. It’s in this space between analogue and digital that Pearly Drops truly come into their own – one part indie band and one part electronic outfit, the duo powerfully fuse the past and present of Finnish music. 

EXPLOITED BODY

Dystopian producer-DJ Exploited Body was playing as I walked into Helsinki’s downtown Kaiku nightclub, and they immediately checked all my preconceptions about what Finnish clubbing might entail. The mysterious collective founded by experimental artist Nori Kin recontextualised familiar British dance traditions like DnB and (OG) dubstep into a new language of pulsing techno rhythms and elegant synths. It’s a genre-colliding approach that carries through to Exploited Body’s original releases – blending breakbeat, glitchcore and more with the fresh perspective that only an electronic music outsider could bring.

MURRETTUMERI

Accompanied solely by the tagline “sounds from the Medusa world”, there is a dreamlike quality to producer-DJ Murrettumeri’s unhinged trance productions. In heavily processed vocals and garbled pop melodies, their latest EP Back Life is significant among Finnish electronic artists for drawing on elements of hyperpop and digicore, and stands as a potent example of what the country’s new generation of electronic artists might contribute in the years to come.