NIGHTWISH - Endless Forms Most Beautiful

»Endless Forms Most Beautiful« will be the first NIGHTWISH studio album to feature Dutch vocalist Floor Jansen (Re-Vamp). Longtime drummer Jukka Nevalainen will sit out on the recording sessions due to health issues (suffering of strong insomnia) and will be replaced by Kai Hahto (WINTERSUN). NIGHTWISH also revealed the famed evolutionary biologist and writer, Professor Richard Dawkins as a guest on this eighth studio album.

It is the first album of the band to feature Troy Donockley, who played uillean pipes and various other instruments on Dark Passion Play and Imaginaerum, as a full-time member.

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.

According to Holopainen, the starting point for writing the song "Élan" was a quote by Walt Whitman (who he referred to as "my hero Uncle Walt"): "Oh, while I live to be the ruler of life, Not a slave, To meet life as a powerful conqueror, and nothing exterior to me will ever take command of me." Holopainen stated, "The underlying theme of the song is nothing less than the meaning of life, which can be something different for all of us. It´s important to surrender yourself to the occasional 'free fall' and not to fear the path less travelled by.

As with every Nightwish album, Endless Forms Most Beautiful was mainly written and composed by Tuomas Holopainen.