Like Peter Grant, I have something of a love-hate relationship with Nightwish. I love their music, but the themes they touch on at times... eh.
That said, it looks like it's time for a new album, and a new single has been released: Noise.
Before we go there, a segue:
If you want to skip the video, it's a discussion of how every public space is utterly polluted by sound - and not even beauty in music, but horrid stuff meant to be ignored and fill the silence until nothing is left, not even room for thought.
Twenty One Pilots covers a similar theme in Car Radio:
So no, it's not necessarily original, but it is interesting to see echoes of this concept showing up more and more places, and the Nightwish song verges harder into how the entirety of the pop cult is also "noise":
The video starts with a frankly creepy figure in a goggled helm, cables plugged into its back, carrying an infant and setting it down on what looks like a sacrificial table, where a helmet is put upon its head, and the video proper start as we see what the helmet shows: Sex, narcissism, and distractions, all of it portrayed asdrugs and distractions from reality, with references visually to the Matrix, and literarily to A Brave New World, among other things.
I wasn't surprised to see the e-thots and drug hawkers, but I was actually surprised to see the environmental movement thrown in as one of said distractions virtue signalling his care for the planet on his phone, and most surprised at the narcissistic mommy in turns paying attention to her phone instead of her daughter, shownig off her perfect life, sucking up to power, showing her daughter how to be just as narcissistic and vacuous, and keeping her daughter in a cage (formed from her skirt).
Some of this is made clear later in the video as the glamour is stripped back and the tawdry effort to appear so perfect is revealed as fake, plastic, and even hypocritical.
Musically, it is standard Nightwish, though on the crunchier side, and allows Floor to stretch herself a bit. The composition is spot on.
From an aesthetic standpoint, the use of speed-changes and multiple angles composited in, and the often-seen backdrop that looks like it is an animated noise filter is interesting.
