Nightwish (Finland) – The Day Of… (single/future album track) + video

It’s taken me a little time to get around to this one, ‘The Day Of…’, the second single from Nightwish’s forthcoming 10^th studio album, but I was underwhelmed by the first one, ‘Perfume of the Timeless’ back in May and consequently, as a fan as well as a reviewer, nervous of what I might find here.

(Incidentally, I wasn’t alone; there has been a fair amount of criticism aired online).

I needn’t have worried too much. If the symphonic metalists had drifted off course a little last time out they’ve at least navigated their way back in the right direction.

The album, ‘Yesterwynde’ is, according to keyboardist, chief songwriter and acknowledged leader Tuomas Holopainen, the last in a trilogy of albums that began with ‘Endless forms most beautiful’ in 2015, followed by ‘Human. :II: Nature’ in 2020.

It won’t be toured but it won’t be their last altogether either (there has been speculation) as they signed a multi-album deal with the Nuclear Blast label this year.

The likes of Aristotle and Socrates had an easier job of philosophising and rationalising than does your average Nightwish fan when it comes to identifying the precise concept of the last two albums. The best I can do is to pick out ‘science’ as the root of ‘Endless forms most beautiful’ and ‘nature’ in the case of ‘Human. :II: Nature’, as indeed it suggests on the tin.

With ‘The Day Of…’ there is a temptation to believe that what must be the most dystopian set of lyrics ever written identify it as an end of days piece, a sequel to Zager & Evans seminal ‘In the year 2525 (Exordium & Terminus)’ and set in the year 2526, and that must therefore be the theme of the album.

Just about every threat to mankind is listed in this “Armageddon”, including war, pestilence, floods, famine, climate (“skies are humming”), the comet, evil AI, evil aliens, ‘mind viruses’ (fake news, brain implants?), domination of the west by a caliphate (a risky and brave subject to include in the present climate), even doom pornography. It’s the 14 Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

Thrown in along this road to oblivion are “the grave new world of ’84”, cleverly linking Huxley and Orwell, ‘Martians’ (which began in Roswell in 1947 but none have ever been displayed publicly), Y2K (1999), Jesus, who’s been absent for a couple of millennia and hasn’t put in a reappearance yet, and “horse waste covering London.” Lord knows what that means.

There’s even the line “yours is an empty sermon”, where once it was an empty hope.

Meanwhile, ‘The Day Of…’ (what?) is never revealed. It remains a secret, just like the monster in Cloverfield.

And perhaps that’s the point. Are they saying that we are born survivors? That no matter what horse waste is thrown at us we will overcome it? That we should by nature be optimistic in outlook rather than pessimistic and stop worrying about things over which we have no control but which will probably never happen?

After all that Doomsday Clock has been stuck on 100 seconds to midnight for a while now and hasn’t shifted, for all the crap that’s going down.

Perhaps we should interpret the song as a natural follow on to ‘The Greatest Show on Earth’ the mammoth composition that concluded ‘Endless forms most beautiful.’ “We were here…and we still are.”

Musically, the tone and construction appears to have followed on naturally from that employed in ‘Human. :II: Nature’, as did the previous single. It would have fitted nicely on that album along with ‘Noise’, ‘Tribal’ and the bulk of ’Shoemaker’. In fact I think it’s in the same obscure time signature as ’Shoemaker’.

I’m tempted to wonder out loud if this has become the default sound of Nightwish now.

It’s big, it’s brash, powerful, bombastic, and impressive, with the pleasing return of the schoolboy choir and a mid-section combined keys/guitar bridge that will probably blow your head off in concert. But all this is de rigueur. That’s what you expect from Nightwish. They are renowned for it.

It’s melodic for sure and it has a great little key change of the kind they excel at but what it doesn’t have is a memorable hook (or two, or three), something they used to churn out with the same regularity as reports of another stabbing on the 9 o’clock news bulletin. And that’s two successive tracks now where they haven’t cut the mustard on that score.

The video, by Stobe Hardu, is fascinating, and worthy of a review in its own right. Apparently they have made one for every track.

All six band members appear on it and they all seem to have contracted Gorillapox, never mind Monkeypox while Floor Jansen looks like a schoolmistress character out of St Trinians.

There’s a smart opening sequence in which they (and we) are subjected to a subliminal procession of the key words and phrases in the song, with Armageddon becoming ‘Harmageddon’ (I’d have preferred Starmergeddon, it’s more topical).

Then they are all sucked out into space, one of them wrapped in a sheet to represent spermatozoa I guess (very 2001 – a Space Odyssey) and then pass through what I assume to be a representation of the history of the world, a Terracotta Army of the dead, all with their hands clenched in a fist pump straight out of 1984.

I see little in the video to challenge my tentative interpretation of the lyrics but others will see it all quite differently of course and that’s what you have to hand to Nightwish; they consistently challenge their audience.

They are going through an experimental phase and when a band’s been around for as long as they have that will satisfy many of the newcomers to it but also irritate many of the old hands. I well recall the division amongst followers of Arcade Fire after they won their Best Album Grammy and then threw their style out of the window for the next album. They never really recovered from it.

That won’t happen with Nightwish. They know which side their bread is buttered on and they won’t deviate too far from it.

At the same time I reckon the majority of their fans will be hoping that ‘The Day Of …’ and its predecessor turn out to be samples of the next album rather than examples.

‘Yesterwynde’ is set for release on September 20th, 2024.

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Website: https://www.nightwish.com/