Human. :II: Nature. by Nightwish
Human. :II: Nature. (stylized as HVMAN. :||: NATVRE.) is the ninth album by Finnish symphonic metal band Nightwish. It was released internationally on April 10, 2020 through Nuclear Blast. It is the band's first double album, with second CD complete with orchestral symphonic music rather than metal. Following the departure of original drummer Jukka Nevalainen the previous year, this is the first album to feature Kai Hahto as official band member, although he had already acted as Nevalainen's replacement on the band's previous album, Endless Forms Most Beautiful. Background and recording Production Following a tour in support of the band's previous album, Endless Forms Most Beautiful, the band took a year-long break in which Jansen was focusing on her first child. Holopainen said in a 2016 interview that the band would continue between the years of 2018 and 2020, with another album that will continue the themes explored in Endless Forms Most Beautiful. According to Tuomas Holopainen, after the creation of the previous album, which he described as "the band's best so far", he could not write new material for the next album because of his lack of inspiration, which was "emptied". In 2017, Holopainen, along with the singer and his wife Johanna Kurkela and the band's member Troy Donockley, formed the trio-band Auri to create a self-titled album. After the release of the album, Tuomas said that "all the flood gates opened" and he started to write new material for Nightwish. In July 2018 while the band was out on tour, Holopainen stated that he had written "80 or 90%" of the material for Nightwish's next album, which would consist of ten or eleven songs. Recording would start in July 2019, for a planned Spring 2020 release. The band would "use the instrumentation in a different way than before", with Holopainen stating, "You want to search for some new ways of using it so that it doesn't end up sounding the same as before." Jansen stated in November that she believed the recording process would be similar to Endless Forms Most Beautiful's, for which the band went through lengthy rehearsals before starting to record. On October 31, 2019, Floor Jansen confirmed that recording for the new album had been completed, stating that she was "very, very happy" with it. Tuomas Holopainen was confirmed on December 18, 2019, to be at Finnvox Studios mixing Nightwish's upcoming studio album, set for release in the first quarter of 2020. The mixing was done by Holopainen, Tero Kinnunen and Mikko Karmila, and mastering by Mika Jussila, at Finnvox Studios. On January 10, 2020, it was confirmed by Holopainen that the production was finished, and the album was ready for release. The album title, cover and other details were released on January 16, 2020, including the release date of April 10, 2020. Composition Influences, style and themes The album features a wide vocal collaboration between Jansen, Marco Hietala and Troy Donockley, which "brings a whole new sound in the band", according to Jansen. It can be reflected for example in first song in the album, "Music", which describes the history of music, "from the first rudimentary sounds to the music as we know today". This song starts with a long intro and described as very harmonic and melodic. "Shoemaker" is about Eugene Shoemaker, whose biography inspired Holopainen to write a song on. According to Jansen, the song lacks of a typical structure. Consists of operatic voices, the song was a challenge to Jansen to sing, and it took several times to record until the desired result. According to Donockley, the lyrics of "Harvest" consist of the meaning of the whole theme of the album and even of life. About "How's the Heart?", Holopainen has said: "Human empathy, altruism, true love. They truly are the better angels of our nature. The nature of the human kind. We have the potential to be such a great species. And in many ways we already are. It is really important to remember to ask your family, your friends, strangers and yourself the important question: How's The Heart?" "Tribal" is described by Hahto as heavy and very percussive. This song along with other tracks in the album demanded Hahto to upgrade his drum kit. According to Hahto, this song is an example to the variety of the different musical styles presented in the whole album. Release and promotion The first single of the album, "Noise", with an accompanying music video, was released on February 7, 2020. The second single off of the album, "Harvest", was released on March 6, 2020, with a lyric video to accompany its release. On March 11, 2020, "Ad Astra", the last track of the album's second disc, was released in a video that revealed Nightwish's new partnership with World Land Trust. Nightwish stated on January 22, 2020, that they became the "first band ever to be given permission" to do a photo shoot in the "legendary Cathedral that is the Natural History Museum, London," where they had four hours to themselves during the shoot. On the day the album was released, Nightwish released lyric videos for all of the songs on the album.
No strangers to concept albums, elaborate arrangements or lush orchestral accompaniment, Finnish symphonic metal magicians Nightwish bolster their ever-expanding ambitions with the double album <i>HUMAN. :II: NATURE.</i> The band’s ninth studio record sees bandleader and keyboardist Tuomas Holopainen’s dizzying compositions realised by virtuosic performances from guitarist Emppu Vuorinen, bassist Marco Hietala, Uilleann pipes wizard Troy Donockley, new drummer Kai Hahto and operatic vocalist Floor Jansen—not to mention the London Session Orchestra. “The complexity of this album is quite something,” the Dutch-born Jansen tells Apple Music. “Rehearsing for it was intense, because some of the vocal melodies are really complicated. They’re quite a mouthful. So I was properly challenged, which I enjoy.” Below, Jansen takes us through each track—including the 30-minute, eight-part classical suite that makes up <i>HUMAN. :II: NATURE.</i>’s second half.<br /> <b>Music</b> “This song is a love letter to music, and charts its history. So it starts with quite a bit of an intro from the most rudimentary sounds that maybe men and women in caves [would have] made—very tribal music, as we know it today. But it has a lovely build-up and it’s a very dynamic song. Musically, this was pretty challenging. The verses were really, really hard to sing. And we played a lot with the harmonies in the chorus. Quite a beginner to the album, I would say.”<br /> <b>Noise</b> “For us, the message of this song was not really about smartphones or the internet, but really about the human behaviour behind it. We are so dependent on it, and it seems we need to hide into a world that doesn’t even really exist. But the real world is still out there. So if you look at the video for this song, the very last shot is an image of the real world—a beautiful sunrise going over a woods. All you need to do is look up from your phone and see it.”<br /> <b>Shoemaker</b> “The title might suggest that it’s about a person making shoes, but it’s not. It’s about a person called Eugene Shoemaker, and I would invite everybody to Google him. He had the dream to become an astronaut—he never did, but in the end he still went up in the sky. His story is beautiful and romantic, but musically it’s a bit of a weird song. It doesn’t have a verse/chorus/verse structure. And again, the verses were a huge challenge to sing. Not to mention the last part, which is sung in opera, and maybe the most challenging thing to sing on the record. It’s also nice to know that Tuomas’ wife, Johanna [Kurkela], is doing the spoken word just before this operatic part.”<br /> <b>Harvest</b> “Troy is doing the lead vocal on this one—the first time for him—and it’s a real feel-good song. But if you really read the lyrics, it isn’t. It’s a complete cheating-death run throughout the whole song, which is really funny because it gives you the ‘Yeah, life is good and you can drink a beer in the sun’ vibe. But the actual message behind it is so much darker. Musically, we played around with the harmonies quite a lot, and obviously this one needed a bit more of the Celtic or folky style. And both Troy and Marco were really great with getting different kind of atmospheres in the harmonic voices here.”<br /> <b>Pan</b> “This is a really complex song. It tickles your imagination. It’s almost a love letter to fantasy, where you can just dive into your imagination. It’s very challenging to play, especially for Emppu. He called it ‘the torture song for old men’, even though later he called it ‘Pancake’. That’s one of the songs I would just love to play live and see how far we get.”<br /> <b>How’s the Heart?</b> “There have been quite a few people that said for some reason that ‘this song really touched me and I can’t quite put my finger on what it is, but it made me stop everything I was doing and I just really felt it.’ And I can imagine that, because I had the same feeling. In general the lyrics are about the power of empathy. In these times, it’s valuable beyond anything else to care for other people and actually show interest. ‘How are you doing?’ That simple question can save lives, and it reconnects you with people. It’s a huge gesture that’s so easy to do and so easily forgotten as well.”<br /> <b>Procession</b> “This is an extremely repetitive song, which I at first did not understand personally: ‘What are we doing here?’ But the repetition with the melodies is intentional and the emotion is vital. We’re telling the story of ourselves. This is a species that evolved after us that does not live on Earth anymore and they’ve left a message back in time for us, for humankind, to tell our story. And if you know that and you start at the beginning, you will come towards the end where you realise that we actually went extinct. With Tuomas’ poetic style of writing, I couldn’t keep my eyes dry. In a way it became one of the most loved songs for me. It’s not a song that you can play on the highway, in your car. It’s a song you play at home with your eyes shut.”<br /> <b>Tribal</b> “This is the heaviest track on the album, and the heavy song on our previous album also kind of went into our not-so-big love for organised religion—and this song is also a shout-out to all the cruelty there. It kicks the sore leg of organised religion a bit—very, very pointy lyrics. But the music itself is very danceable. It just makes you work out. It was a huge challenge for our drummer, but I can’t wait to do this one live.”<br /> <b>Endlessness</b> “This song was written for Marco to sing, and his vocals just fit so beautifully. And I sing the harmonies in the chorus. They’re so weird that I remember them instantly—and I’m not great with harmonies that are weird, usually. It takes me a while to actually feel them. But it’s a super sad song—very doomy. It’s about the endlessness of time, and Marco is singing as if he’s time. It’s super dramatic and heavy. One of my favourite tracks on the album.”<br /> <b>All the Works of Nature Which Adorn the World</b> “This is Tuomas’ love letter to nature. If somebody had told me 10 years ago that I’m going to be in a band where somebody that does all the songwriting decides to write a classical suite of eight parts that lasts for 30 minutes and you’re not going to be on it, I would say [sarcastically], ‘Well, that’s cool. Thank you.’ But when it happened in Nightwish, everybody was just like, ‘I can’t wait to hear this, because we know it’ll be amazing.’ And this piece really takes you through different scenery—you might feel like you’re out on the ocean or in the middle of the woods or out in the fields. Then in the end it gets a little more dramatic, where you see the Earth while we’re leaving it. It’s very beautiful and apocalyptic. We even connected the song to a video we made together with the World Land Trust, which is a big organisation that helps to preserve our planet. So at least it feels like we’re making a small effort to help protect the dot we’re on.”
