In the celebrated Nightwish song ‘Seven days to the Wolves’, ‘heroes’ and ‘cowards’ “part ways”. Then at the end (although not on the band’s official lyrics) they are “no more”, while vocalist Floor Jansen altered that final line to read “no more lies”.
The joint announcement by the symphonic- and prog-metal Finnish band Nightwish and Floor Jansen on 15th October that the latter is leaving the band to pursue her solo career, one that emerged out of the Covid pandemic, an appearance on a Dutch TV show, Beste Zangers, in 2019 in which local singers performed each others’ songs in their own style, and Nightwish’s lengthy hiatus from recording and live performances since mid-2023, must leave its millions of fans worldwide scratching their heads as to who the heroes and anti-heroes are in this affair amidst the obfuscation.
After all it is hardly the first time that a Nightwish singer has abruptly left the band under nebulous circumstances. It is the third.
Dutch national Jansen, a professional singer since the age of 16 and already a veteran of the bands After Forever and ReVamp, and who was recovering from a nervous breakdown at the time, joined Nightwish very suddenly in 2012 as an emergency addition after the then Swedish vocalist Anette Olzon was unceremoniously dumped while in a Denver hospital bed amidst a North American tour, Jansen famously flying out at very short notice to pick up the pieces and learning the lyrics to an entire two-hour show in 48 hours despite serious private reservations about what she was doing.
She rapidly became a huge fan favourite, confirming her popularity in what has become recognised as Nightwish’s seminal performance at the Wacken Open Air Festival in Germany in 2013 in front of an 85,000 strong audience, at the same time polarising the opinions of fans that had previously supported the earlier singers Tarja Turunen and Anette Olzon.
She has often been identified since as the leading female rock vocalist on Earth, including by this publication.
She went on to record the main vocals on the band’s ‘science and nature’ trilogy of albums ‘Endless Forms Most Beautiful’, ‘Human. :II: Nature ’ and ‘Yesterwynde’ between 2015 and 2024 and was lined up for Nightwish’s 11th studio album which is being written right now by leader, founder and songwriter-in-chief Tuomas Holopainen and scheduled for recording in 2027.
During the writing and touring hiatus Holopainen, his wife Johanna Kurkela and Nightwish member Troy Donockley conspired to write a third album for the folk-prog band Auri and to tour Europe widely in late 2025 and then again at Finnish festivals in 2026. That left other Nightwish members twiddling their thumbs and filling their time as best they could. Drummer Kai Hahto joined Auri to record and tour and played his own percussion-oriented gigs.
Guitarist Emppu Vuorinen and bassist Jukka Koskinen went their own ways and slid off the primary metal radar.
That most definitely was not the case with Jansen, who seized the moment to advance her own career, releasing a solo album in 2023 with another scheduled for release in January 2027, and touring regularly to perform in front of large crowds. Indeed the 34,000 crowd that packed Amsterdam’s Ziggo Dome arena over two nights in late 2022 to watch Nightwish might have been as much inspired by Jansen’s sudden rise to fame in that country (few had even heard of her before Beste Zangers) as by the band.
After her second album ‘Hytress’ is released she has a full-blown European and South American tour lined up. She evidently isn’t short of work.
(Nightwish has recently begun to release videos of the two Ziggo Dome shows. ‘Seven days to the wolves’ is shown below).
Nightwish may have green-lighted Jansen’s performance of Nightwish songs during this period in order to retain interest in the band while the hiatus worked itself out. Indeed she has performed many Nightwish songs on her tours, from the ‘Yesterwynde’ album that Nightwish has not yet performed live as no tour was ever organised for it.
The most moving of those songs is ‘Lanternlight’, written partly as a tribute to Holopainen’s father and also as a celebration of life, and wonderfully sung by Jansen.
Whether Tuomas Holopainen will look so benignly on similar requests from her to sing Nightwish songs in the future is a moot point for now.
The question many Nightwish fans will be asking right now is who, if anyone, is at fault for this situation which threatens to bring down the entire band in its 30th year and which had only recently and belatedly started to celebrate that anniversary publicly. Holopainen has stated in the past that if Jansen ever left then Nightwish would be over but today’s statement that ‘Nightwish will continue’ flies in the face of that position.
And it wasn’t that long ago, in January 2021, that bassist and vocalist Marko Hietala dramatically quit the band, citing depression as one of many reasons, upon which the remaining members then came very close to calling it a day.
Nightwish has been here before, several times, and previously attracted opprobrium from supporters for what has been described as misogynistic treatment of the two previous singers. Apart from Olzon, who was pregnant when sacked in 2012, original vocalist and founder member Turunen was summarily dismissed at the end of the final concert of the global ‘End of an Era’ tour on home turf in Helsinki in October 2005, and by way of a letter handed to her by the band which was also made public, effectively for being a self-important diva.
The impact was sufficiently severe to prompt Holopainen to write later a raft of songs about the causes of that dismissal, what led up to it, and how it affected him personally, including the incredibly poignant 14-minute epic ‘The Poet & the Pendulum’, in which he describes the turmoil of Turunen’s firing, and his own imagined death by suicide as he atones for it and is ‘reborn’ to begin a new era.
There is no suggestion of animosity between Jansen and Holopainen or other band members. All appear to have had the greatest respect for each other and to have got on well although Jansen revealed in an interview this year that she had some reservations about the vocal role taken over by Troy Donockley when Marko Hietala left (and despite the fact that she has sung some ballads with him, live).
The writing seemed to be on the wall though a couple of months ago when in another interview she expressed disappointment at the lack of communication and that Holopainen had not informed her of any prospective dates for recording or live work, given that she was trying to organise her own tours in early 2027.
And in the past she has complained that the decision to embark on a lengthy hiatus came just as she was entering the crucial mid-stage of her career, being now in her mid-40s and after delivering two children and having been operated on successfully for cancer in 2022.
The hiatus got longer and longer and may have simply proven to be too much.
The statements from both Nightwish and Jansen are quite bland, using terminology like mutual agreement , future ambitions, and expressing regret at what has happened, appreciation for the past, and now looking to a great future for both parties. You get the impression this has been some time coming, like the treaty to end a war is written long before the last gun falls silent.
In Jansen’s statement she refers to the ‘rollercoaster of her life’ invoking another poignant Nightwish song ‘Last Ride of the Day’.
So, it’s the end of another era – and possibly the last – for Nightwish. Can they pick themselves up for one last fling? For all their achievements, which include over 10 million records sold, over 60 Platinum and Gold awards, being included in the Finnish Music Hall of Fame (they should be in every one in the world in my opinion), having probably the most reacted-to ever YouTube music video (for ‘Ghost Love Score’ at Wacken), having a creature named after one of them (Sciophila holopaineni),for being compared to Mozart! (Holopainen)… I could go on, there are so many things left for them to do.
Such as playing at Glastonbury, Coachella and other leading festivals for example (they would have to headline) and playing a concert with a full orchestra.
Somehow, I think they still can. I get knocked down, but I get up again, as Chumbawamba once sung.
But the search for a new singer will be the key. Already suggestions fill the airwaves, including the highly unlikely return of either Turunen or Olzon (both of whom are performing Nightwish songs in their own shows), or the adoption of Holopainen’s wife, Johanna Kurkela, from Auri, who has the sweetest of soprano voices but can’t belt.
Perhaps they already have someone in mind but they have time on their side as they don’t go into the studio until April 2027. There are many symphonic metal singers who can fit the bill. The trick is to find that one with that little bit extra because these are mighty boots to fill and not only because Floor Jansen is 6ft 1in tall.
I doubt any of this will prompt other departures.
As for Jansen, she now ventures out on her own without Nightwish to fall back on. She has built quite a following in her solo persona but music is a fickle business and you are only as good as your last album. We wish her all the luck she needs and hope that she hasn’t taken any questionable ‘advice’.
And perhaps Tuomas will write a song about her. That would be nice.
For their part Nightwish don’t need luck. Just as fast as possible a return to normalcy and consistency.
There are more questions than answers yet for the five million strong global ‘Nightwish Army’. At least they have several excellent tribute bands to keep them going through these dark days, at least in Europe.
For my part, I was a latecomer to Nightwish, which began in 1996, and as an acoustic band at first. I didn’t encounter them until around 2014 when I discovered their cover of ‘The Phantom of the Opera’, filmed at Turunen’s last ever concert, and even then knew little about them until I by chance discovered they were playing a show at Manchester Arena in December 2018 and which blew me away.
In the eight years since then I have come to the (subjective and objective) conclusion that in terms of musicianship, songwriting, stage craft, the vast variety of their material from the most tender of ballads to the heaviest of metal, the fact there is at least one memorable hook in every single song, and the sheer excitement and emotion they generate in live shows, that they are unique and second only to The Beatles in the field of popular contemporary music since 1960.
For that reason alone I hope they can get over this latest setback as rapidly as possible and get back swiftly to what they do best.
