Tarja Turunen‘s Frisson Noir arrives as the heaviest album of her career, a record that brings together flamenco guitar, shamisen, tango strings and the creative freedom she says has taken years to find. Seven years on from In The Raw, the Finnish soprano set out to capture the sheer weight of her live sound in the studio, and the result is an album that refuses to play it safe.
Tarja Turunen Frisson Noir: Building the Wall of Sound
‘I want to bring back the riffs,’ Turunen says simply. To get there, she enlisted producer Neal Avron, whose credits include work with Fall Out Boy, Linkin Park and Serj Tankian. After self-producing In The Raw, she wanted someone who could translate what she hears from the stage into a recording. ‘When I perform live with my guys, my band sounds heavy,’ she explains. ‘I have a big voice, so I want them to sound heavy to support me. I feel comfortable in that wall of sound. I’ve been missing that sound.’
The gamble paid off. ‘Neal did an amazing job,’ Turunen says. ‘It was challenging for him to work with a symphonic orchestra and choir; all these symphonic songs, progressive songs, but he loved it.’ The result is a record that stretches across 10-minute epics, guest-heavy collaborations and songs more than a decade in the making.
The first single, At Sea, runs to 10 minutes and was pushed out ahead of shorter material at Turunen’s insistence. ‘When I’m writing the songs I’m not really looking at the timer: I’m really letting myself go nowadays, which is a very beautiful feeling,’ she says. The fans, she found, responded in kind. ‘The fans really sat down to listen, which people do not do nowadays. We do not have the patience any more to listen or pay attention. It’s like everything is fed to us.’ Turunen lives near the coast in Marbella and is a keen scuba diver. At Sea draws on that connection: the song is, she says, about leaving the safety of the shore and facing the storm without knowing the outcome, a leap of internal strength she equates with putting the album out at all.
Guest Spots, Johatsu and a Song a Decade in the Making
The guest list on Frisson Noir tells you everything about the album’s ambitions. Dani Filth of Cradle Of Filth appears on I Don’t Care. Apocalyptica bring their strings to Tango, a nod to a musical tradition Turunen grew up with. ‘We Finns love tango,’ she says. ‘I remember, in my youth, dancing tango with my dad at summer parties; it’s a very important part of Finnish culture.’
The Trace Outlives features Sayo Komada on shamisen, an instrument Turunen describes as ‘like a percussive guitar.’ The song was inspired by johatsu, the Japanese word for people who choose to vanish from their established lives, often out of a sense of shame. ‘Some organisations help people disappear,’ Turunen says. ‘It caught my attention; I wanted to write about the effects when something like this happens, and the emotions involved.’ Finding a Japanese voice for the track felt necessary: ‘Komada is insanely talented, playing heavy metal with the shamisen in Japan. It was beautiful that she took part.’
Flamenco enters the picture on Anemoia, a word meaning nostalgia for a time or place one has never experienced. Julián Bedmar, a flamenco guitarist, plays on the track. ‘Who the hell uses flamenco guitars in a metal album?’ Turunen asks. ‘I do.’ Bedmar lives ten minutes from her home in Spain. ‘This is my 10th year in Spain; my family found a beautiful home here. Flamenco is a huge cultural aspect of Andalucia, and I wanted to say “thank you.”‘
Against The Odds is the album’s longest-gestating track, originally considered for 2016’s The Shadow Self before Turunen felt the time wasn’t right. That album featured Chad Smith guesting on drums, brought in by bassist Kevin Chown. ‘During the years since The Shadow Self I’ve grown,’ Turunen says. ‘I found that song and I feel it now.’
Leap Of Faith brings in Nightwish alumnus Marko Hietala, marking their second collaboration after a duet on Hietala’s Left On Mars last year. For Turunen, working together has been a chance ‘to get to know him for the first time ever. He’s not the same guy he was; neither am I. We are somewhere else now in our lives, and it’s been really nice to reconnect.’ They’ve also toured together, ‘supporting each other like never before.’
Turunen studied at the Sibelius Academy in Finland and at Germany’s Hochschule für Musik Karlsruhe, and the classical discipline runs through everything she does, even when she’s actively pushing against it. ‘That’s what I’ve been struggling with: to free my mind when it comes to compositions,’ she says. ‘I’ve learned so much. Finally I feel it’s happening; that I’m becoming free with my music; it’s a feeling I don’t need to be afraid of. There are no mistakes I can make here.’ Frisson Noir is on sale now.
