Sharon den Adel laughs a lot as she speaks. She makes for entertaining company and seems to exude both a calm, confident air and an overwhelmingly positive attitude. She looks to be on the verge of tears, however, as she recalls the UK tour that was her worst ever moment in Within Temptation, the band she co-founded with her high school sweetheart, husband-to-be, songwriting partner and guitarist Robert Westerholt.
The pair had been the beating heart of the band since its inception in 1996, but the pressures of burgeoning success and combining a simultaneous romantic and working relationship had simply become too much. It was 2007, and their fourth album, The Heart Of Everything, had propelled them to worldwide success. It debuted at No.1 in the Netherlands, making it their second album to top the charts in their homeland, but they had also broken into the US Billboard charts for the first time.
The record was widely seen as a pinnacle of symphonic metal, and it paved the way for a major world tour. Behind the scenes, though, things had reached an impasse.
“We had America done, and then a European tour, and it was terrible,” Sharon recalls. “The tour wasn’t terrible, we had a lot of success, but [Robert and I] were not in a good place together. Eventually we broke up and we still had to go through England. And that was the worst tour ever, because we had already split up and still had to do it. It was agony, but I think the audience loved it, because I never had so much passion as at that time. I was just screaming it all out!”
The period nearly saw the end of Within Temptation, but the pair decided there was a lot worth salvaging, in both musical and personal terms. They set about redefining how they could work and live together, and the band continued to cement their ongoing position as one of Europe’s most successful metal bands.
Worldwide arena tours and chart-topping albums seemed a long way away when the members of Within Temptation first got together in the small town of Waddinxveen in South Holland. Sharon was a grunge kid who was singing in a band project in school. Schoolmate Robert Westerholt, meanwhile, had a series of ‘proper’ bands, and Sharon was happy to jump in when the singer of one of them skipped one too many sessions.
After morphing through a few more versions, Within Temptation were born, and they quickly began work on their 1997 debut album, Enter. As well as Sharon’s soaring vocals, the album made use of Robert’s gruff death metal growls and heavy doom riffs. The symphonic elements were yet to crystalise, but there was a darkly lustrous sweep that owed more than a little to the arch goth-metal of Paradise Lost’s aptly titled Gothic. The band embarked on a brief tour of the Netherlands, and their fifth ever gig was at Dynamo Open Air, which at the time was one of Europe’s biggest festivals.
“It was the most amazing moment at that point in my life, but it was also the most scary, because I had no clue how anything worked. We were still figuring things out and we were playing for 10,000 people in a tent,” Sharon recalls today. “Our record label was great at promoting us, and when we came to the festival there wasn’t a wall that didn’t have my face on it. It’s like, ‘Oh my God, I see myself a thousand times. But there were 10,000 people going, ‘Who the heck are this band and why is everybody talking about them?’”
Even so, playing in a metal band in the Netherlands in the late 90s was more a calling than a career plan. The likes of Pestilence and The Gathering had enjoyed limited international success, but it did not look like a fast track to fame and fortune, and in the band’s early days Sharon also worked at a fashion company. As a child she had dreamed of being a designer, but practicalities funnelled her into the management side – until Within Temptation gave her the chance to combine two of her greatest passions.
“When we started with this very epic sound, I felt like, ‘This is my chance.’ I always felt like it fit the music. If you make epic-sounding music, you need an epic dress as well,” Sharon says. She remains heavily involved in the band’s strong visual presentation to this day, even if she had to nudge her bandmates at certain points along the way. “We started in pirate blouses,” she says. “And one of them I made myself for Robert. Actually, it was one of the pieces that I had to deliver to get my degree.”
Their second album, 2000’s Mother Earth, was a watershed moment for Within Temptation and the nascent symphonic metal scene in general. The sweeping Ice Queen single became a surprise hit, and the band found themselves rising stars in Europe.
2004 follow-up The Silent Force continued the band’s ascent as they further explored grandiose elements. Over in Finland, Nightwish were doing something not too dissimilar, but Sharon insists there was no rivalry between the two bands.
“It was in the minds of journalists and it was rivalry that they created,” she shrugs. Sharon would later duet with original Nightwish vocalist Tarja Turunen on Within Temptation track Paradise (What About Us?), and Tarja joined the Dutch band as a special guest on parts of last year’s Bleed Out tour.
“Our paths didn’t cross for a long while, which is strange, because there were so few women in metal back then,” Sharon says. “It would have been nice to have someone like her to confide in. It is sometimes tough to be on the road with only men.”
A notable tour that didn’t feature men only was the band’s first trip to the US, where they played alongside Lacuna Coil, The Gathering, In This Moment, Stolen Babies and Kylesa on a tour dubbed The Hottest Chicks In Metal Tour 2007.
“I didn’t know it was the Hottest Chicks tour until I was on the airplane going over to America,” Sharon says. “I found it hilarious. It’s just a way to sell the tour, of course, and I understand where it comes from, but there would never be The Hottest Men In Metal Tour.”
That tour was in support of 2007’s The Heart Of Everything, which saw the band hit the pinnacle of their pure symphonic metal era. The US leg saw them playing small clubs, but their profile was growing, and in Europe they were selling out theatres and appearing at major festivals such as France’s Hellfest, Austria’s Nova Rock and Download in the UK. They were now major stars, but they were never really a band for rock star shenanigans.
“We had the occasional private jet moment,” says Sharon with a laugh. “I remember playing the Desert Rock festival in Dubai, and all the bands were picked up in these huge Hummers in different colours. We were treated like royalty. You can enjoy it, but you have to realise it’s not real life. It will ruin you in the end if you buy into it.”
Despite the growing success, they avoided many of the temptations of the road. Where some bands have drug dealers on speed dial, Within Temptation would travel with their racquets and would occasionally employ a professional tennis coach to come out to them. The fact that Sharon and Robert had welcomed their first child together also helped keep them grounded, but added to the pressures on the couple, which came to a head on the tour for Heart Of Everything and their subsequent, if ultimately temporary, split.
“It was something that was bound to happen, I guess, because we’ve been school sweethearts since we were 18. You grow up and you’re in a different place, a different person,” Sharon sighs. “We just grew apart because you do everything together. You write together, you perform together, you have a family together. And I do not suggest anyone does that. You need to have space on your own to develop, but also to have something different to talk about with your partner.”
There followed several months of soul-searching that Sharon describes as “the heaviest and the darkest period of us being together”. The song In And Out of Love that Sharon recorded with Dutch DJ Armin van Buuren was a reflection on the process, and her first real inkling that she might want to do something outside Within Temptation.
Eventually though, Sharon and Robert got back together and looked at new ways of working within the band. “He said, ‘I can’t be in the band anymore if you want to have a relationship’, and I said, ‘I think that’s a good thing, because we’re like two captains on the boat and we are killing each other in front of everyone else,’” Sharon recalls. “We had an Eastern European tour and we went without him. I said, ‘You have to take care of Luna, our baby, and I’m going to go on tour and we’ll figure it out when I come back.”
When Sharon returned, they spent a few months figuring out how to make their relationship work. “We were actually dating again a little bit, going out together again,” she says. “That was a starting point.”
The long-term solution involved Robert stepping back from touring completely to look after their expanding family, while remaining a pivotal songwriter. “He does one-off things with us, but he doesn’t miss really being on tour with us,” says Sharon. “He’s more the composer and he enjoys enjoying the show from afar.”
Having taken the symphonic elements as far as they could on The Heart Of Everything, and the spectacular orchestra-accompanied Black Symphony show and live album, Within Temptation entered a more experimental phase. 2011’s The Unforgiving was a concept album with related short films and comic books that embraced their 80s musical influences.
2014’s Hydra was a many-headed beast packed with musical twists and guest appearances, the most surprising of which was And We Run featuring rapper Xzibit.
“I think we were testing ourselves through this whole time,” Sharon nods. “It was that whole arc of wanting to try different things and to move on as a band. Just struggling to find our new identity a little bit. The Xzibit song drew some negativity but we loved it, and I still think it’s a great song. I’ve always also liked the combination of rock and rap together, right from Aerosmith with Run DMC.”
The cycle spun on, and at the end of another world tour supporting Hydra, the whole band found themselves burned out. The singer in particular found it difficult to return to Within Temptation and experienced crippling writer’s block.
“I didn’t feel it anymore, perhaps also because of things that were happening in my personal life,” she says. “My dad was diagnosed with cancer and I felt the need to be at home a lot. At the same time, I needed to make a different kind of music, because I was in a different kind of emotional world.”
The outcome was a solo project dubbed My Indigo, which resulted in an album of the same name. It was released, Sharon says, on the day of her dad’s funeral. It was a more vulnerable and introspective work that also helped to unblock the creative channels, ultimately leading to new Within Temptation music in 2019’s industrial-tinged Resist and their most recent album, 2023’s Bleed Out. The latter could be seen as the band’s most political release yet, written against the backdrop of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and the title track dealing with the death of Mahsa Amini, who had been detained by Iran’s ‘morality’ police.
Sharon also travelled to the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, to film a video for standalone single A Fool’s Parade featuring Ukrainian artist Alex Yarmak. “I felt it was pretty safe,” she recalls. “We had a few air alerts while there, and I did get a bit of a scare, because it was a MiG apparently, and I was told they can have supersonic bombs that can destroy a specific area in a few seconds. So, OK, we’re going down to the metro station now [to shelter].”
For Sharon it was a profound experience, and another notable chapter in what has been an extraordinary career – and one that’s certainly not over yet. “Next year we’ll have been in existence for 30 years,” she muses. “I don’t know how or even if we’ll celebrate it, because mostly we never look back. We want to do a new album with new ideas again. That’s the drug that we need, and it’s all about looking forwards.”
Within Temptation play Download and Wacken festivals this summer.
