NIGHTWISH vocalist Floor Jansen has revealed that she is four months pregnant.

The singer, whose partner is SABATON drummer Hannes Van Dahl, is expected to welcome her first child next year while NIGHTWISH is off the road for the band's previously announced year-long break.

NIGHTWISH keyboardist and main songwriter Tuomas Holopainen told TeamRock: "The issue of Floor having a kid came up earlier this year. I asked her if she had been thinking about having a child and she said, 'Yeah, actually, I have.' So I said, 'Well, we're thinking of having a break so if you want to...' And here we are.

"It's just a wonderful, beautiful thing because now she gets to be with him or her for a year before we continue so it's perfect timing."

Jansen, who officially joined NIGHTWISH in 2013, recently shot down speculation that NIGHTWISH's upcoming break has something to do with tension between members of the group. She told AXS: "Even though we will have this year off, it doesn't have anything to do with how things are in the band. I've seen some people starting to gossip online of why we [would] take a year off. We'll take a year off because we can and because we want to. That's all there is to it. It has nothing to do with how things are in the band. And it also doesn't mean that we haven't been thinking about what's coming next; we have a lot of cool stuff coming up. So we hope that, after this break, people will still be equally excited to come out and see whatever we've got cooking up in our kitchen for them."

Jansen made her live debut as the frontwoman of NIGHTWISH on October 1, 2012 at Showbox Sodo in Seattle, Washington following the abrupt departure of the band's lead singer of five years, Anette Olzon.

Olzon later told Prog magazine that her pregnancy was a major factor in her former bandmates' decision to fire her from the group. "That's how I see it," she said. "Why [else] should they kick me out when they got to know I was pregnant?

"We, of course, had some problems in 2009, but we had a good tour and there was nothing else coming until then."

The NIGHTWISH members responded in a statement on their official web site, accusing their former singer of making claims that were "full of twisted truths and defamation."

"The split with Anette wasn't because of pregnancy or illness," they said. "We discovered her personality didn't fit this work community, and was even detrimental to it."

They added: "Anette told of her pregnancy to the whole band already a week earlier in Montreal. Everyone was congratulative, and Anette herself offered an option of hiring a replacement vocalist if she couldn't manage everything, which was already agreed on. Later she took back her decision, and the difficulties really started."

NIGHTWISH will play four shows in Asia next month before completing the world tour in support of the band's latest album, 2015's "Endless Forms Most Beautiful".

Photo above courtesy of Yell! Magazine