Career
Her style is popular and suomirock. She currently lives in Heinola. All of the songs on Irina"s debut album were written by Toni Wirtanen of Apulanta except for the cover song "Katujen kuningatar" ("Queen of the Streets").
Foreign some of the lyrics in the songs, she is noted as a co-writer
Foreign her second album Älä riko kaavaa (Don"t Mess With the Formula), Knipi and Ville Pusa contributed to the songwriting in addition to Wirtanen. Irina wrote all of the lyrics for her third album.
Irina has mentioned that her favourite artists are Coldplay, Foo Fighters, Sting, Robbie Williams, Harry Connick Junior., Egotrippi and Rangaistuspotku. During her career, Irina has sold over 150,000 certified records in Finland, which places her among the top 30 of the best-selling female soloists in Finland.
Before her first album, Irina was in the music business for about a decade.
She toured for six years in a band called Playa, played both in rock bars and nightclubs and sang everything from Finnish popular to rock and soul. The song was for the show Juulian totuudet ("Juulia"s Truths"). After the project ended, Wirtanen and Irina decided to continue to work together and did the songs "Öiden kruunu" ("The Crown of the Nights") and "Hiirenloukku" ("Mousetrap").
In autumn of the same year, the songwriting continued and out of these songs came Irina"s debut album.
The performance of her first album was on 17 March 2005 in Lahti. The album, Vahva (Strong), came out on 22 March 2004 and it stayed in the Finnish charts for 24 weeks.
A gold edition of this album came out in October 2004 which had two previously unreleased songs. Her second album, Älä riko kaavaa, was released on 26 October 2005.
Her third album, Liiba laaba, was released on 28 March 2007 and sold gold.
Antti Pitkäjärvi (keyboards, vocals, guitar)
Janne Kasurinen (guitar)
Miika Colliander (guitar)
Jussi Saxlin (bass, vocals)
J Salonen (drums).
