NIGHTWISH Endless Forms Most Beautiful CD

Floor Jansen's full-album debut with Nightwish was always going to be a moment. After the Anette years and the live audition that became legend, Endless Forms Most Beautiful arrived in 2015 as both a declaration and a love letter, to Darwin, to science, to the kind of symphonic metal that makes you feel like you're standing at the edge of something vast.

Tuomas Holopainen wrote this record around Richard Dawkins' The Ancestor's Tale, which tells you everything about the ambition level. The title track alone runs over twenty-four minutes. Troy Donockley's uilleann pipes weave through Marco Hietala's bass thunder, and Floor proves definitively that she is one of the most commanding voices in metal, full stop. The Finnish five-piece have never sounded more like themselves, which is to say enormous, cinematic, and completely uninterested in being anything other than what they are.

Format: CD, full length album. Released 2015. Origin: Finland. Genre: Symphonic Power Metal. Fans of: Epica, Within Temptation, Delain, Tarja-era Nightwish.