AFTER THE NIGHT

Splitting with Nightwish threw Anette Olzon’s life into chaos, and she tried to quit music for good. With The Dark Element, she’s finally rediscovering her love for metal

After five years fronting one of the biggest metal bands on the planet, Anette Olzon’s time in Nightwish came to an abrupt and messy end. During the band’s 2012 US tour, she found herself hospitalised with stomach flu, bedridden and unable to perform. Just days later, she found herself out of the band… and out of a job.

Although the rest of her bandmates stated that the split had been “in mutual understanding, for the good of all parties involved”, Anette fiercely maintained that, like her predecessor Tarja Turunen, she had been fired, and it was because she was pregnant with her third child – a claim the band have strongly denied.

“When I came home I cried and cried. It was like going through a divorce – it was just horrible,” she remembers when asked how she coped in the initial aftermath of the split. “Also I was ill, and I couldn’t help being ill. I felt very… mistreated.”

Today Anette is speaking to Hammer over a Skype call from her home in her native Sweden, just a short drive from where she recently laid down vocals for her new symphonic power metal project, The Dark Element, with former Sonata Arctica guitarist Jani Liimatainen. As she talks about their new, self-titled album, and the prospect of an upcoming tour, she sounds relaxed and excited. However, it’s clear that those post-Nightwish days were incredibly difficult for her.

“I’ve come so far that I can feel happiness in many things that happened during those years,” she admits. “I don’t have that anger towards the boys that I had in the first one and a half or two years. I was very angry.”

Does she still feel her pregnancy was the reason for her dismissal? “It’s so hard for me to say, because I don’t have their version and I don’t know what they were thinking,” she replies after a pause. “It’s been hard for me since I couldn’t talk to them. I still feel that those years were incredibly stressful for me. It was like a rollercoaster ride. There are many things I don’t have recollection of. I think some people thought I was quite stupid, to get pregnant and get kicked out of that band. But I have never regretted that I was pregnant.”

For all its obvious highs – she emphasises that being the vocalist in such a huge band was a dream come true – Anette found life in Nightwish stressful. The overnight fame, crazy touring schedule and being away from her family eventually took its toll. In 2014, desperate to regain control of her life and career, she decided to go it alone, releasing solo album Shine, a collection of songs that she had written while still in Nightwish between the Dark Passion Play and Imaginaerum albums.

But persuading the hardcore Nightwish contingent to buy an album of AOR melodic rock overseen by Celine Dion’s producer was always going to be a hard sell, and the album performed disappointingly. In August 2015, things came to a head, and on her personal blog she announced her decision to step away from music to train to be a nurse, stating she had lost “all the sparkle for music and singing”. “I didn’t know if I would be back,” she remembers now. “I just felt, ‘I’m going to be with my children and my husband, I’m going to be a nurse and help people.’”

Since then, she’s gradually dipped her toes back into the metal world, duetting on tracks by Swedish symphonic metallers Blood Bound and UK power metal tribe Power Quest. The

“It was like going through a divorce”

AF TER NIGHTWISH, IT TOOK ANETTE A LONG TIME TO REGAIN STABILITY

Dark Element, however, is the first full metalorientated album she’s appeared on since leaving Nightwish, and it seems that at long last she’s regained her passion for singing. “The fans had been urging to hear me in those kind of songs again,” she says. “I didn’t know what it was going to sound like and I didn’t know that much about Jani himself, just that he’s been in Sonata Arctica, so it was a bit of a gamble.”

Someone at Italy-based record label Frontiers had suggested Anette as a possible vocalist for an album’s worth of songs Jani was planning to write for The Dark Element. The songs were written with her voice in mind, and the result is an energetic symphonic album awash with vibrant synths, frenzied guitars and anthemic Euro-pop melodies, in the vein of Amaranthe, that suit Anette’s voice to a T – especially on singles Here’s To You and My Sweet Mystery.

“I opened the demo and I could immediately hear that this would be a good album,” she says. “Jani is such an amazing songwriter. He uses my voice in a way that these songs sound incredibly catchy and you can’t stop listening to them.” So far, only one album is planned, but Anette says both she and Jani are keen to do more. “We want this to be a long-lasting thing,” she says. “But it also depends, of course, if people like it.”

Now Anette plans to balance her nursing studies with obligations in The Dark Element, finally nailing that happy medium between her personal and musical life that was so missing during the Nightwish years. As a result, she’s in a much better place, emotionally and musically.

“When you think that it’s 10 years since I did Dark Passion Play, it’s like ‘Whaaat?!’” she laughs. “And when you see photos of yourself, you’re like, ‘God I was young.’ But it’s a bit of a charm to be older and wiser, and maybe calmer. I have a good life. I’m very happy.” The Dark Element IS OUT ON NOVEMBER 10 VIA FRONTIERS