Petri Selin doesn’t move fast, and he doesn’t seem to mind. The Helsinki songwriter released his debut single “Kesä saapuu vihdoin Helsinkiin” back in 2018, and “Verstas,” out May 17th, is only now arriving as the follow-up, written, performed, and self-produced entirely on his own with no label involved at any stage. He sings exclusively in Finnish, leaning on a folk-pop base with the occasional rap cadence worked in. The title translates to “workshop,” and there’s a reason for that.
I personally love Finnish music and got used to listening to its unique rhythms and cadences from a song called “Sankarin Tango,” which featured on the soundtrack of the critically acclaimed video game Control. This song is much more upbeat and much more candid, telling the story of how Selin’s own father spent his life: a World War II veteran who went on to play bass in Helsinki dance bands through the 1940s and 50s, then spent his later years running a one-man advertising business out of his own cellar workshop, the verstas the song takes its name from. Selin wrote and recorded the whole thing himself, the same way he’s worked since 2018, treating the song less like a polished tribute and more like he’s finally putting decades of collected memories and turns of phrase to use.
Selin’s been sitting on these words for years by his own account, and that patience shows in how specific the song’s central image is. A cellar workshop is a small, particular detail rather than a grand symbol, and it only carries weight because his father actually worked there. That specificity does more than any sweeping tribute language could. With only two singles to his name across eight years, Selin clearly isn’t chasing a release schedule. “Verstas” reads as something he needed to make on his own terms, in his own language, whenever he was ready, and that unhurried, self-contained approach is really the whole story here.
