Metal
Nightwish and Floor Jansen announced on 15 October that they are parting ways. “After careful consideration, we have, in mutual agreement, decided to part ways,” the band’s statement reads. “This decision is necessary and important to us and our future ambitions.”
Jansen joined in October 2012, standing in for Anette Olzon partway through the “Imaginaerum” tour, and in 2013 Nightwish announced her as their full-time singer. She sang on three albums: “Endless Forms Most Beautiful” (2015), “Human. :II: Nature.” (2020) and “Yesterwynde” (2024).
The last time Jansen sang with Nightwish was on 17 June 2023, at the Lemonsoft Stadion in Vaasa, and nobody knew then that it would be the last: the Tons Of Rock festival date in Oslo five days later was cancelled over her health, and the band has not played since. That April it had already announced it was stepping away from the stage indefinitely. “Yesterwynde” came out in 2024 and was never toured.
“NIGHTWISH will continue. We will move forward and enter the studio in 2027 to record a new album,” the statement says. Jansen writes that “endings create new beginnings” and that her solo career will now get all of her attention, which “gives my new upcoming album and the tour all space to grow”. That album is “Hytress”, out on 15 January 2027 through Revamp Music and Warner Music, her second after “Paragon” (2023).
The statement says the band is celebrating thirty years. Nightwish formed in Kitee, in Finnish North Karelia, in 1996, and Jansen was its singer for fourteen of those thirty.
Text by Roger Estivill