When it comes to the Eurovision Song Contest, Finland is better known for its failures than for its successes. That is why the Finish group Lordis succes in the contest came as a total suprise. Lordi won the Eurovision Song Contest 2006 with their song Hard Rock Hallelujah.

Hard Rock Hallelujah sounds nothing like most other Eurovision entries. The song is melodic hard rock, a genre seldom associated with the Eurovision.

Lordi, originally hailing from Arctic Lapland, became a phenomenon in Finland with the Platinum-selling debut album Get Heavy in 2002. Since then, the band has scored Finnish hits with the albums like The Monsterican Dream (2004) and The Arockalypse (2006). Lordi is no big star in Europe, but the album The Monster Show has been released in more than 20 countries.

The name Lordi applies both to the group and its lead singer who looks even less like an ordinary Eurovision contestant and more like a heavily made up monster hard rock band along the lines of KISS or Twisted Sister, or a group of characters from a gory 1980s splatter movie.

The song Hard Rock Hallelujah has now been made available for cell phones also. The French mobile phone content provider Mediaplazza has published the ringtone as a traditional monophopnic version and as a polyphonic one.