#twilight force

Oceanborn has some great tracks starting with Moondance, one of my favorite Nightwish instrumentals, and it ends with Nightquest, one of my favorite metal songs about TTRPG fantasy nonsense (another favorite is Soulforged, by Blind Guardian, but that's not important right now). Oceanborn also boasts all-timers like Passion and the Opera and Walking in the Air—it's really just an extremely solid album.

Wishmaster is up next and has more of my all-time faves: The Kinslayer, Bare Grace Misery, Crownless, and FantasMic are all so fun. as a whole, Wishmaster intentionally leans into the fantasy vibe harder than Oceanborn did but either way nothing gets me hyped the way power, operatic, and folk metal do, and I think the backing instrumentals of both albums' songs are amazing matches for Tarja's voice! Dead Boy's Poem is featured on this album too, and while I don't revisit it super often it's worth listening to specifically because the dead boy and imagery related to him are going to recur in future Nightwish songs. I find FantasMic notable too because it's specifically about Disney animated films and is named after Disneyland's Fantasmic! live show.

if forced, I would probably pick Wishmaster as my favorite album of this era, but Once is a close second. Once has the largest number of my favorite songs all in a row: Dark Chest of Wonders, Wish I Had An Angel, and Nemo. it also has Ghost Love Score, which you might recognize a snippet of if you were on the internet 19 years ago when an extremely specific meme was still a thing. Nemo is a little slower-paced but otherwise all of these songs really showcase the grand, sweeping feel of Nightwish at its most well-composed: the instrumental tracks really just carry the listener off with them, or at least that's the best way I can describe it.

now, onto the post-Tarja era! this was a turbulent era for Nightwish, and the woman they replaced Tarja with, Annette Olzon, was only with the band from 2006 to 2012. she joined the band a year after Tarja was dismissed and is the main vocalist on their sixth and seventh albums, but then she got dismissed from the band due to the "direction and needs of the band [...] (leading) to a division from which we cannot recover". she claims it's because she got pregnant, they disagree, either way it does strike me as iffy that Nightwish had trouble retaining female lead singers for a while after suddenly dropping Tarja. I will say this era of Nightwish is still really good—Annette has a very different voice from Tarja's, but not a bad one by any means.

Dark Passion Play is an album I don't have much to say other than I liked it a lot: it's a very obvious shift in the band's vibes, especially because the male members of the band start contributing a lot more to the vocals from here on out, and I think they make for an interesting contrast with Annette's vocals. highlights of this album for me include the opening track The Poet and the Pendulum, Amaranth (which I think deserves to be up there alongside many of Tarja's best songs, if I may say so), Master Passion Greed, and Last of the Wilds. I love an instrumental track I can mentally plan a ttrpg campaign to.

Imaginaerum was a VERY big project for Nightwish—Nightwish made a concept album, a feature-length film, and a musical score for said film that all share this title. I think it's extremely good, and it's a shame Annette was dropped from the band after this point because I honestly think this is where she proved she was just as capable as Tarja of conveying the big, bombastic, sweeping and 'epic' vibe Nightwish loves to showcase. if you only listen to one track from this album, listen to the title track, Imaginaerum, because it's basically an overture that incorporates motifs from all the other songs on the album. my personal favorite track is Last Ride of the Day, but other really good tracks are the opening track, Taikatalvi, and the song immediately following it, Storytime. highly recommend listening to them back to back. Annette kills it on Storytime.

in 2013, with Annette Olzon gone, I have to admit I was feeling really cynical about the future of Nightwish. if they can't keep a lead singer for longer than a couple albums anymore, what's the point of getting attached, you know? but then they brought Floor Jansen on board and so far she's still their lead, and I have to admit that she might be my favorite Nightwish vocalist?

Floor's first album with Nightwish was Endless Forms Most Beautiful, which I went into very skeptically but instantly fell in love with. it opens with Shudder Before the Beautiful, which I feel is one of Nightwish's best songs, full stop. I love the lyrics, I love the feeling the instrumentals convey, and I love the power in Floor's voice. she adds so much oomph to her vocals in a way I can't really quantify because I'm usually too busy swooning. Weak Fantasy is next, then Élan, and then—you know what, I'm just gonna say it: this is a no skips album for me, at least when I have the time to properly take it all in. if you want my favorite faves, then you can start with the opening track and then jump to the title track Endless Forms Most Beautiful, then Alpenglow, and. then end on The Greatest Show On Earth, which I believe is still Nightwish's longest song to date but is thankfully also a blast to listen to. this is probably my favorite Nightwish album, and I feel bad saying that because it feels disrespectful to Tarja after all she did for the band and operatic metal as a whole, but something about this album just hits perfectly for me.

after that we have Human :II: Nature, which... I am still overall kind of ambivalent about. its first single, Noise, has a good instrumental track and Floor sounds great as always, but... the song itself is Nightwish's commentary on smartphone addiction and social media, and I'm always skeptical of any media project that exists solely to say "smartphones! modern times, am I right? what are you gonna do!" and then ends without adding anything substantial. the rest of the album is fine? Harvest is fun for being markedly different from a lot of other Nightwish songs—at some points it sounds like a song that might play during a musical number in a fantasy film, where all the peasants are farming and singing about how great harvest time is. I have no explanation for this, but it somehow makes me think of the opening of Quest for Camelot. I will be honest, I need to listen to this album more—I don't have a ton of thoughts on it. it's fine but nothing here jumps out at me the way the previous album did at every turn.

Yesterwynde is Nightwish's ten studio album, and it came out a little over a year ago—Nightwish is currently on hiatus other than possibly considering doing some shows in 2027 for the band's 30th anniversary. I believe a couple members of the band are touring with one of their side projects, Auri, which I know basically nothing about and need to look up sometime. I think Yesterwynde is a stronger album than Human :II: Nature, but that's probably because it's got more of that darker, faster vibe I like: An Ocean of Strange Islands shares a lot of its DNA with Shudder Before the Beautiful, so I'm automatically biased toward it. it's also just a stronger start to an album than Noise was, and I like The Antikythera Mechanism a lot too. much stronger opening tracks here! The Day Of... is another 'topical' song about, you know, the general State Of The World, but I think it's a lot stronger than Noise. it's got a good chorus (I love when Nightwish unleashes a horde of singing children onto a song) and it doesn't feel boomery like Noise kinda does to me. it's still kind of bleak, since it's just sort of commenting on current events without positing that things could change or improve, but we stay silly. Sway is one of those acoustic-forward songs you sometimes get from a folk/operatic/power metal band that needs to change things up a bit, and it works really well, especially since it's followed up by Children of 'Ata, which is very pleasingly synthy. instead of just reviewing the album track by track I'll end by recommending The Weave and call it a day.