Nightwish
Nightwish are the reason “symphonic metal” stopped being a contradiction and became a genre. Built in Kitee, Finland around Tuomas Holopainen’s film-score ambitions, they survived two very public vocalist changes — Tarja Turunen, Anette Olzon, Floor Jansen — and each era created its own fanbase instead of splitting one.
The lab keeps coming back to them because their family tree touches everything in Finnish metal, and their vocalist saga is the genre’s best case study in how a band outlives its own voice.
Pull a thread
Nightwish's 30th-anniversary box set contains zero live audio from two of its three singers
The Greatest 30 Years On Earth arrives on 11 December 2026 with fifteen live songs spanning three vocal eras — and one voice singing all of them. The tracklist is the argument.
The count nobody is going to do
Two live discs, recorded in Amsterdam in 2022 and in Kitee, Finland, on 16 June 2023. Fifteen songs, not counting the intro. Sort them by which singer they were written for: