EVANESCENCE‘s first album of original music in a decade, “The Bitter Truth”, will be released on March 26, 2021 via BMG.
Starting now, fans can pre-order a digital version, CD, vinyl and a limited-edition deluxe fan box set featuring a bonus CD, journal, poster and special cassette of exclusive audio from the making of “The Bitter Truth”. Every pre-order will automatically come with downloads of already-released songs “Wasted On You”, “The Game Is Over”, and “Use My Voice”, as well as “Yeah Right”, the band’s latest song to be released, out today.
Heavy and playful, the song’s industrial groove combined with Amy Lee’s biting lyrics reveals a self-cynical view of the band’s experience thus far in the music industry.
“The Bitter Truth” is an epic, guitar-driven collection inspired by the (often-bitter) realities of the 21st Century and our world. The already-released songs have received early accolades from Elle, Billboard, SPIN, American Songwriter, and more, and showcase the “ferocious and hymnal” (The New York Times) sound that made EVANESCENCE a household name, as well as the drama and powerhouse vocals that made Amy Lee “one of rock’s definitive voices” (Rolling Stone).
EVANESCENCE‘s new music was produced by Nick Raskulinecz, who also worked on 2011’s self-titled LP.
When asked in an interview with U.K.’s Rock Sound if it was still accurate to describe the new EVANESCENCE material as “dark” and “heavy,” as she did last year during the early stages of the songwriting process, Lee said: “It’s hard to sum up. I don’t think you can sum it up just by saying that. In our first sessions that we did when we were writing together, definitely we were focusing mostly on just raw and heavy, because we’d just come off of ‘Synthesis’ and we were just dying to kind of document our sound as a group — which is cool, and we needed it, and it is a part of this album for sure. But it’s gonna be more of a full palette than just that.
“It’s been a really long time since we’ve put out a full new album, so it’s important that we kind of do it all and use all of the parts that make up our sound, if that makes sense,” she continued.
“One of the things that we’ve been kind of aiming towards is taking the elements of what maybe are things that make up our sound and try to separate them and give each of them their own space. So some of the songs don’t have strings and are fully rocking and heavy. And then some of the songs might be really in the electronic zone, and something might be more on the orchestral side. But overall, definitely coming off of what we just came off of, it’s gonna be a rock record.”
On the topic of “The Bitter Truth” album title, Amy said: “As the lyrics had started to form, and just my feeling in this moment in general, there’s a big theme of disillusionment for me. Just growing up and seeing that fairy tales aren’t really real. And it’s hard to be a grownup — it really is. Because somebody else isn’t in charge, we really have to be able to make our own decisions, find out our own information, protect ourselves. People die — we’re all going to. There’s no magic castle. So that sounds like a lot of doom and gloom when I say it, but there’s a choice to accept that truth and live in it and embrace it and choose to live and choose to live in a moment, and the choice to just give up. And there’s a struggle there, but my choice is most definitely to take that pill.”
EVANESCENCE spent much of the last two years recording and touring in support of 2017’s “Synthesis”, which contained some of the band’s best-loved songs — as well as a couple of new ones — reinvented with full orchestra over a deep electronic landscape.
