Colours in the Dark is the fourth studio album released by Finnish vocalist Tarja Turunen. It was released on August 30, 2013, in Austria, Brazil, Finland, Germany, Portugal, Spain and Switzerland; September 2 in Norway, Poland, and the Czech Republic; September 3 in the United States and Canada; and September 4 in Belgium, Denmark, the Netherlands, Sweden, and the UK. Mixing was done by Tim Palmer in Austin, Texas.
The name of the album, as the cover image, came as a metaphor from the idea that life has a large range of colors and the dark absorb all of them, containing every colour.
The vocal recordings of the album started late 2012 and continued throughout the beginning of 2013. Titles of the album's songs were revealed from times to times through Tarja's blog, like she did with My Winter Storm (2007). The album's name came out of the song “Until Silence”. This is the third time the album's name came out of one of the songs.The artwork and some promotional pictures for this album were taken mainly in India during the What Lies Beneath World Tour in 2011. During the end of that tour Tarja already performed “Into the Sun” and a different version of “Never Enough”. Both songs ended up on the Colours in the Dark album.
During the process of composition, Tarja alleged that she “had to learn a lot as a soloist, for good and or evil, and often in the past years [she] thought that [she] would never reach a day coming to the point where [she is] today”, also adding that she had a lot of “positive and negative” experiences that would finish on this record, that's “very rich in colours, shadows, deep aspects and that it does not capture at the first listen”.