It’s all about H.I.M.

Unless you’ve got your ear to the underground, you might be surprised to learn that the headliner for sold-out shows tonight at the Avalon Hollywood and Saturday at the Wiltern LG is ... H.I.M.

H.I.M. who?

H.I.M. is actually a them -- a Finnish quintet recently picked up by Sire Records that boasts hard-rock riffs, a goth approach and emotion-drenched lyrics such as “And I love every single tear you cry/I just love the way you’re losing your life” (from “Gone With the Sin”). The band, currently on its first major U.S. tour, has a four-album pedigree and a strong following in Europe.

But at the heart of H.I.M., and a key attraction for labels that courted the band, is frontman Ville Valo, a self-professed “big romantic” and a sucker for speed-metal riffs.

“I heard three songs by the Ramones and I wanted to sign them. The thing I go by the most are songs, and he can write them,” Sire Records Chairman Seymour Stein says of Valo. “He’s a star. He just stands there and he has the audience under his control. Musically the band is sensational, and they give him the perfect vehicle.”

Says Brian Stillman, managing editor of the metal magazine Revolver: “The music’s got some [guts] to it. It’s not flaky and poppy, but the vocal stylings and the subject has that gloomy vibe. It’s cool enough where you can listen to love songs, but it’s not wimpy.”

That potent 1-2 combo of lyrics and riffs is also how H.I.M., despite having never had proper U.S. distribution, has graduated from playing the Roxy and Whisky during their first visit to L.A. to the stand this weekend.

“One of the first songs we ever played was our cover version of Chris Isaak’s ‘Wicked Game,’ ” Valo says, “and that sort of gave us the idea that it can be pretty straightforward rock like AC/DC, but still have the sentimentality that I love about music in general.”

Like artists such as Linkin Park and Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor, Valo seems to speak to youth angst. Unlike American artists, though, Valo is doing it in a language other than his native tongue. “I never thought that in an English-speaking country people would like the lyrics so much,” he says in a phone interview from Denver. “It’s really surreal for me personally, being a 28-year-old kid from Finland writing in a different language and seeing people understanding the emotions behind it all.”

Maybe it’s the common ground Valo shares with American fans. The first show he went to was Iron Maiden and W.A.S.P.; the first album he bought was KISS’s “Animalize.” His band has an old-school metal name (H.I.M. stands for His Infernal Majesty) and sense of humor (two early album titles contain the digits 666, although not a flicker of satanic themes). Musically those influences come through in the furiously paced riffs of “Buried Alive by Love,” as well as in softer tracks like the acoustically flavored intro of the melodic power ballad “The Funeral of Hearts.”

The combination of gloom, rock and sweeping hooks fueled H.I.M.’s European popularity, and attention from American labels followed. “We were in a really lucky position that there were loads of major companies and big indie labels into the idea of signing us,” Valo says.

Sire President Michael Goldstone believes H.I.M. can have a significant impact in America. “It’s such an important band for us to be able to relaunch the label with. And it has a thread that has always been important to us in the past, such as bands that have always carved their own aesthetic and didn’t fit in, but ultimately influenced other bands,” he says.

After the band finishes off its current tour in L.A. this weekend, Valo plans to return to Helsinki to write, then come back to L.A. to record the album next spring.

Winning over American audiences would realize Valo’s teenage dream: “I wrote my first song when I was, like, 13. I didn’t actually start writing lyrics until I was, like, 17, 18, and I never tried to write any lyrics in Finnish. I was such a huge fan of Black Sabbath and U2, Elvis Presley, whatever, I had high hopes of getting to tour internationally.”

His hopes are equally high for his band’s proper American debut. “We had a crazy idea of trying to incorporate, let’s say, U2’s ‘Achtung Baby’ with AC/DC’s ‘Back in Black,’ ” he says. “Have an ethereal quality to it, have it melodic and melancholic, but still really straightforward and rocking.”

Stillman believes H.I.M. can expand on a growing U.S. base. “He’s already doing well in America and he barely exists here. Given the type of music that H.I.M. is doing I bet the kids will jump on it because they’re looking for somebody new.”

Regardless of the expectations that come with a bidding war and sold-out tour, Valo says H.I.M. will continue to build on the foundation laid down in previous work.

“We released four albums in Europe and if you listen back to all of those albums, even though they might be a couple of years apart, the essence of the music and the lyrics, the core, has been the same since the beginning. We’re just trying to get better at it,” he says. “It’s like trying to paint a monkey. Maybe by the thousandth time it’s going to be a bit better and by the ten thousandth time it’s going to be a bit more realistic again.”

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H.I.M.

Who: H.I.M. with Monster Magnet, and Auf der Maur

Where: Avalon, 1735 N. Vine St., Hollywood

When: 8 p.m. today

Price: Sold out

Info: (323) 462-8900

Where: Wiltern LG, 3790 Wilshire Blvd., L.A.

When: 7 p.m. Saturday

Price: Sold out

Info: (213) 380-5005

Steve Baltin can be reached at weekend@latimes.com