Shuddering with Nightwish

Endless Forms Most Beautiful is the band's first album with new singer Floor Jansen, as well as the first to feature Troy Donockley, who played uillean pipes and various other instruments on Dark Passion Play and Imaginaerum, as a permanent member.

It is also their first album without drummer Jukka Nevalainen, who had to take a temporary break from the band due to suffering of strong insomnia, leading him to step away from both the album and its subsequent tour. All the drum parts on the album were consequently played by Kai Hahto from Wintersun and Swallow the Sun. Due to this, the album features only five Nightwish members, despite being their first album released with the band being a sextet.


Concept


The album was primarily inspired by the work of naturalist Charles Darwin. According to Nightwish's main songwriter Tuomas Holopainen, the album found its main inspiration from a famous quote from Darwin's 1859 highly influential book On the Origin of Species. This quote included the words "endless forms most beautiful", used by Darwin to describe the evolution from one common ancestor to all living organisms, that were subsequently chosen as the title of the album.

Tuomas said he would like fans to listen to the album from beginning to the end, like they do when they watch a movie, instead of listening to songs on a random basis. He also said there is a "very loose" concept in the album: "It's all about beauty of life, the beauty of existence, nature, science".
Comparing it with Imaginaerum, he said: "The previous album was a tribute to the power of imagination. Endless Forms Most Beautiful would be an equal tribute to science and the power of reason".

“There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”

Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species.

Endless Forms Most Beautiful (2015)

1. Shudder Before the Beautiful

2. Weak Fantasy

3. Élan

4. Yours Is an Empty Hope

5. Our Decades in the Sun

6. My Walden

7. Endless Forms Most Beautiful

8. Edema Ruh

9. Alpenglow

10. The Eyes of Sharbat Gula

11. The Greatest Show on Earth

I. Four Point Six

II. Life

III. The Toolmaker

IV. The Understanding

V. Sea-Worn Driftwood

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