Context

Maustetyttö Kaisa Karjalainen said of this song, in an interview with Helsingin Sanomat published January 30, 2026, "It's probably one of the most personal songs. It tells about our last few years." (Translated.)

In spring 2023, Maustetytöt released their third album, Maailman onnellisin kansa, and began an extensive tour of Finland.

In September, Aki Kaurismäki released his film Fallen Leaves internationally. A performance by Maustetytöt featured prominently in the film. That fall, Maustetytöt began to tour throughout Europe.

This tour continued and expanded as the popularity of the film, and Maustetytöt's cameo within it, grew. At its conclusion, in a December 2024 Instagram post, band members Anna and Kaisa Karjalainen quantified its intensity:

It is starting to look like we went through this tour alive. We started on March 17th, 2023, the same day as Taylor Swift and finished three days before her. Taylor had 149 shows in 53 cities on her tour, while Maustetytöt performed 166 shows in 96 different cities during the same period.

Kaisa Karjalainen told Soundi of this period, in the magazine's March 2026 cover story, "We spent every free month abroad. Eventually, we both got pretty burned out and had to take a little break." (Translated.)

Now she recalls lying on Anna’s couch in the midst of her worst exhaustion and dreaming of a career where work wouldn’t follow her home.

"I remember feeling like I wanted a 8-to-4 job. Like I couldn’t take this anymore. But luckily, it doesn’t feel that way anymore. I do struggle with chronic fatigue almost every day, but it’s still under control," Kaisa says.

"If you realize you can’t enjoy what you’re doing at all anymore, I think that means something’s wrong," Anna says. "This is supposed to be a passion-driven career, one you originally chose because it felt good."

At its most intense, touring really led to such exhaustion that nothing felt good anymore. As exhaustion set in, the band began to set clearer limits on how many gigs Maustetytöt could do in a year. Last year there were 15, of which only five were in Finland.

(Not currently on the web.)

"I like Juhla Mokka"

Juhla Mokka is the most important coffee brand in Finland. The name translates essentially to "celebration coffee," the kind you might serve to guests, but it has become the quintessential everyday filter coffee bean to brew at home, sell in a corner store, or offer to employees.

The core version is a light roast, with lively acidity and even a little sweetness, albeit held back with typical Finnish restraint. Or maybe, as its critics would say, it's just flat and dull; younger Finns can judge this 1929-vintage brand a little more harshly than their grandparents. Still, it remains an attractive enough mark that supermarkets regularly slash its price for brief periods to lure shoppers into their stores.

In an example of its cultural significance, an entire Aki Kaurismäki film, the wonderful "Take Care of Your Scarf, Tatiana," is premised on the restlessness of a protagonist who runs out of Juhla Mokka at the movie's start. (He eventually wires up a special contraption so that he can brew it in his car and keeps his face buried in a mug for most of the rest of the film.)

The actor who portrays this coffee obsessive is Mato Valtonen (below) who, incidentally, has introduced Maustetytöt to the stage of his Pyhä Unplugged music festival, where the band has twice played, all according to lilli m!

For more on Juhla Mokka's relevance in this song, see the next note.

"No coffee backstage again"

Important context on this and on Juhla Mokka from lilli m:

Coffee is very important to us Finns. We may be the number one coffee consumers in the world. The point is that, when abroad, we Finns often are disappointed with the filter coffee. I know many people who take a package of Juhla Mokka with on their vacation and make coffee in their hotel room. Coffee theme continues in the line "there’s no coffee in the backroom again". What a frustration to a caffeine addict.