In a first for Finnish popular music, Dark Light, the most recent album by Finnish love-metal band HIM, has taken an RIAA gold disc for sales of 500,000 copies in the United States.
The album was released in the US market in the fall of last year through Sire Records.
On its week of release it rose to #18 in the Billboard charts, another milestone for a Finnish band.
Worldwide sales of Dark Light stand at around 900,000. The band's several CDs have sold an estimated four million copies all told.
The news of the accolade is welcome in the immediate wake of an announcement that HIM will be cancelling their planned North American tour, which was slated to take in 11 dates (ten in the USA and one in Toronto) during October.
The band announced they would instead be concentrating on work on their new studio recording, now scheduled for release in the fall of 2007.
Before then the band will put out two compilations - Uneasy Listening Vol. 1 and Vol. 2 - which will include alternate mixes of earlier HIM songs.
