Thirty years in and Nightwish are still one of the most genuinely interesting bands in heavy music. Not because of the spectacle, though there is plenty of that. Because the origin story is so brilliantly, awkwardly human.
The new issue of Metal Hammer lands with the Finnish symphonic metal veterans on the cover, and the timing is right. Three decades since it all kicked off in Kitee, a small Finnish town apparently known for moonshine and, now, for producing one of the genre's biggest acts. Tuomas Holopainen and Floor Jansen sat down with the magazine, and what came out of it is a reminder that even the bands who go on to play opulent royal banquets started somewhere mortifyingly small.
"I thought I was going to die"
Holopainen's account of Nightwish's first ever show is the kind of thing that makes you feel better about your own worst moments of stage fright. The gig was at a local recording studio on New Year's Eve 1997, a couple of months after the band's debut album Angels Fall First had already reached No. 5 in the Finnish charts. So the pressure was real.
"I was so scared I thought I was going to die," Holopainen tells Metal Hammer. "I think I vomited before the show. I'd played shows before, but I was just the keyboardist in those bands, I wasn't responsible for those songs. Nightwish was my baby, I was like, I can't f***ing do this!"
There is something worth sitting with there. The album was already charting. People already cared. And the man behind the whole thing was being sick backstage at a recording studio in a town famous for moonshine. That is not a polished origin story. That is real, and it is brilliant.
The issue also takes readers to Kitee for a personal tour of the world's only dedicated Nightwish museum, guided by Holopainen himself. Thirty years of a band's life in one place, from the nervous debut to the singer swaps that caused genuine controversy along the way.
The Rest of the Issue
Metal Hammer has packed this one out. Alongside the Nightwish cover story, the issue revisits the making of Slayer's Reign In Blood, an era that apparently involved demons, gremlins and erections in roughly equal measure. In This Moment's Maria Brink gets the full Hammer Interview treatment, covering her teenage motherhood, her move to Los Angeles at 25, and her longstanding sense of being a witch. Beartooth's Caleb Shomo talks openly about coming out to his fanbase, and Tony Iommi breaks down his first solo album in two decades. Legendary director and composer John Carpenter also pops up to confess he would love to direct a video for Metallica, which is genuinely one of the better things we have read this week.
Atreyu at a Magic: The Gathering convention, Orbit Culture's Niklas Karlsson going from slaughterhouse to stage, and Imminence apparently inventing something called violincore round things off in fine fashion.
For anyone who has followed the longer arc of symphonic and progressive metal, the Nightwish story carries weight. [Evanescence's run as one of the genre-adjacent acts who made it genuinely big](/uprise/music/evanescences-biggest-ever-london-show-is-a-triumphant-spectacle-powered) shows there is an audience for this kind of ambition done properly, and Nightwish have been doing it longer than most.
The issue is on sale now. If the Holopainen interview is as honest throughout as that quote suggests, it is worth your time.