Astral Sleep is a Finnish Doom Metal band formed in the summer 2004 when Markus Heinonen, fed up with his former band's inactivity decided to start a new project. He recruited his old friend Rolle Heinonen (despite having the same family name the guys are not related) and the two started writing music.

Inspired by the late, great Unholy, Markus wanted to have a full line-up able to play live and so they invited another old friend Jaakko Oksanen to play the bass. The three had played together in a band around 2002. After a few rehearsals the band got their first gig on Kauksu-Rock 2005 (a small local festival) where they used Rolle's younger brother Roope as a session drummer.

The band prepared to record their first demo during the summer of 2005 and finally got the process started on September 8th when Markus got his long-time friend Rolf Pilve to help with the drums. The recordings, mixing and mastering took a bit longer than anticipated, the whole editing process was finished on November 19th. The debut demo was simply self-titled and contained two lengthy tracks, Landscapes (16:19) and Window To The Sky (20:04). Bubonic Doom released a cassette version of the demo on September 25th 2006.

In the spring of 2006 the band had studied the feedback to the debut demo and written new music. 5 songs were ready and after a lot of thinking and discussion the guys decided to record a full-length album. Tommi Häyrinen joined the band as a full-time drummer after hearing the new material. The recording process proved to be challenging due the lack of proper equipment and resources. It was started on August 15th 2006 and finally completed on September 8th 2007. Now the band is looking for a record company to release it.

The full-lenght album Unawakening was released on September 2008 by Solitude Productions. The band has also a new drummer, Jiri Pyörälä. Read more on Last.fm. User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License; additional terms may apply.