NIGHTWISH TRIVIA
Trivia
In October 2022 Japanese shows were announced. Billed as the Nightwish Japan Tour 2023, it was to be three nights: 25 January at Namba Hatch in Osaka, and 27 and 28 January at EX Theater Roppongi in Tokyo. Six and a half years had passed since the band last played Japan.
The band may be off the road, but Yesterwynde has not stayed off the stage. Their own site reports that, after three sold-out shows and six thousand listeners in Tampere, the orchestral version of the album was performed at the Musiikkitalo in Helsinki on 21 March 2026 — by the Vantaa Orchestra, the Tampere Opera Choir and a children's choir, conducted by Eero Lehtimäki.
Tuomas Holopainen once ranked his band's own albums from first to ninth. From the top: Human. :||: Nature. (2020), Endless Forms Most Beautiful (2015), Oceanborn (1998), Once (2004), Imaginaerum (2011), Dark Passion Play (2007), Century Child (2002), Angels Fall First (1997), and at the bottom Wishmaster (2000).
The album Holopainen placed last was Wishmaster. He grants that it went to number one in Finland, but to him it is one of those in-between records: on a personal level it does not stand out. Coming after Oceanborn, as he puts it, there was nothing revolutionary about it.
On what Metallica have meant to Nightwish, Holopainen puts it this way: he does not think they would be where they are without that band. And he offers a scene. About a year earlier, at a festival he thinks was in Belgium, he came off stage after the last song and James Hetfield was there, giving him a pat on the back. All Holopainen could get out was a short expletive. Never meet your heroes, he adds, is what they say.
When Marko Hietala left in January 2021, Tuomas Holopainen thought the band was finished. Devastating, is how he puts it. They had known about the problems Hietala was carrying and it was still an enormous shock to all of them. For about forty-eight hours, he says, he was convinced that was the end of Nightwish. He remembers ringing Emppu Vuorinen — can you believe what has happened again — and the two of them laughing about whether this was it.
In announcing the break the band went out of their way to rule out two explanations. The statement says the reasons are personal, but that all of them agree they are vital to the wellbeing and the future of the band; and that they still love working together. It then adds, explicitly, that the decision has nothing to do with Floor Jansen's pregnancy and nothing to do with anyone's separate projects.
Nightwish are an unusual beast, in Troy Donockley's phrase, because the members actually like being with each other. It is a rare thing in a band — plenty of them keep separate dressing rooms and so on — whereas this lot socialise even when they are not working, and enjoy each other's company. The example he gives is that the year before, Emppu Vuorinen and Tuomas Holopainen came over to Yorkshire and the three of them spent a week metal detecting, purely for the fun of it. That, he says, is what they do, and they have an enormous amount of fun doing it.
Those shows did not happen. In December 2022 all three were cancelled. By the band's own explanation, the final stage of the treatment that would return Floor Jansen to full health had been moved forward from February to January, which made it impossible for them to come to Asia as scheduled. The statement added that their whole team was working to make sure they would see everyone again soon.
This is how the band themselves described Yesterwynde on their own site: a fantastical voyage through time, memory and the better angels of human nature — three years in the making, and their tenth album.
Nightwish are partnered with the World Land Trust, the British organisation that buys land in order to protect it. The partnership sits permanently at the foot of the band's own site, which invites readers to go and look at what the trust does.
When Tuomas Holopainen started Nightwish in July 1996, what he wanted to make was moody acoustic music. He and the guitarist Emppu Vuorinen both had a strong background in metal, though, so moving towards something heavier came naturally. Even so, by his own reckoning, that original idea of an acoustic band can still be heard strongly in what they do.
The album Holopainen put at the top of his own list is Human. :||: Nature. The reason he gave is its shape: first a set of songs about humankind, and then you put on the other disc, relax, and go into nature. His memories of making it, he says, are happy ones.
The song Tuomas Holopainen names as the greatest rock or metal song of all time, for him, is Metallica's 'One'. It is a ballad. Beyond calling the composition, the lyric and the video brilliant, his reason is that it comes from around the time he found metal music at all, so it brings a great deal back with it.
Holopainen heard that same song live in Kansas City in September 1992, at a Metallica and Guns N' Roses show, where it was the last song before the encores. It completely blew his mind, as he remembers it.
On 'Perfume of the Timeless', the single that preceded Yesterwynde, Holopainen said this: every one of us is the result of an unbroken chain of millions of ancestors and their loves. The song exists to remind people of that remarkable fact — and if you are not amazed, he wrote, listen to it again, because it is important.
What changed Holopainen's mind after those forty-eight hours was a phone call from their management: think about it again — you have had twenty-six years of quite a ride, do you want it to end like that? He decided that was a fair point. If they were going out, they should go out stylishly; and they had survived bad things before, so perhaps they could survive this. Within a few weeks things looked brighter, and Jukka Koskinen arrived. The stars have been out of line many times, in his words, and it is good to have them aligned now.
Holopainen's explanation of how the records became a trilogy is a simple one. The moment Endless Forms Most Beautiful was finished he knew they had to write more songs on that theme, because there was so much left to explore and to tell people. The same thing happened after Human. :||: Nature. So they would do one more — at least one more. Of the third instalment he said there would be major surprises in it, and that it nonetheless felt like a natural continuation of the last one.
In April 2023 Nightwish announced that they were stepping away from touring. The Human. :||: Nature. World Tour was drawing to a close, and a statement signed by all of them said that after the shows planned for that June they would be putting live performance aside for an indeterminate period, and would not tour the next album.
The same statement that announced no touring also promised a record: an album of twelve new songs would see daylight in 2024, along with three music videos. Yesterwynde, when it appeared in September 2024, did indeed carry twelve songs.
Troy Donockley explained in 2024 how the break came about. All of them were part of the decision and none of them was forced into it — but they had been pointed towards it early on, before the pandemic, because they had realised they were in danger of burning out from doing too much. The time off is for all of them, he said, it has no time limit, and they have no plans whatever for when they might bring the band out to play live again.
The break is not terminal, in Troy Donockley's account. It is extended time off, and what he can envisage is some live work around 2027 — the band's thirtieth anniversary year. He imagines they will do something on stage to mark it.
Troy Donockley has also put the reasons more concretely. The long album-and-tour cycle becoming harder year on year is a large part of it — but take that with six people all feeling the same way, then go out for seven weeks, then three weeks in South America, then Japan, then five weeks in America. All of them have families, and Floor Jansen has two small children. As a way of living, he says, it causes confusion.
As of August 2026, this is what Floor Jansen says about the band: nothing is planned. Nightwish are on a temporary hold, and there has been no communication about when anything might happen.
The bass player Jukka Koskinen became an official member in August 2022, but he had first appeared on stage with Nightwish more than a year earlier, at the two interactive shows the band staged in May 2021. In the year between, he toured with them as a session musician.
Where Nightwish stand in Finland may come across better in this description than in any number. A Barks column written from Helsinki in 2015 says they are so big that there is probably nobody in Finland who does not know them, and that there is likely no other domestic band singing in English that can sell out Hartwall Areena, the country's largest indoor venue, on the spot.
On the day Endless Forms Most Beautiful was released, Nightwish held a signing in the basement of the Forum shopping centre in the middle of Helsinki. For the previous two albums the signings had been held at midnight in record shops in the city, at the moment the album went on sale; this time there was a pre-listening party in a bar the night before, the album went on sale at midnight, and the signing took place at five in the afternoon on release day. A pop-up record shop was set up at the venue, selling the album with a poster.
In the spring of 2015 Nightwish worked with the Finnish jeweller Kalevala Koru. Floor Jansen was the face of that spring's Kalevala campaign, and the rest of the collaboration was to be revealed on the world tour later the same year.
The drums on Endless Forms Most Beautiful and on the tour behind it were played not by Jukka Nevalainen but by Kai Hahto. Nevalainen, who had suffered from insomnia for a long time, stepped away from the album and the tour on the grounds that he could not give it everything. The Barks piece of the time introduces Hahto as the drummer known from Swallow the Sun and Wintersun.