AMY LEE Says New EVANESCENCE Music Has 'A Lot Of Guitars'

EVANESCENCE singer Amy Lee spoke to SiriusXM's "Debatable" on the Volume channel about the band's upcoming album, "The Bitter Truth" (BMG). The band's first collection of new original music in nine years, "The Bitter Truth" is being made available incrementally throughout 2020.

"We're still writing, but we're also recording," she said (see video below). "We got four songs down, and then we really had to just be apart. And that was kind of good, but kind of hard — we just worked remotely for a while. We got the American bandmembers back together. After getting COVID tests and tour buses brought guys from both coasts, we all holed up in Nick Raskulinecz, our producer, his private studio, so we were quarantining together for a little over a month.

"Let me tell you — after not having the option of being together when we had wanted to so much and having so much isolation before that, the fact that we had created a safe way to get together just totally made it more meaningful and more passionate and lit a bigger fire under us to make it our best," she continued. "So we were able to get together and finish some writing, do some more writing together, and then record the band parts. The guys have gone home now. And we're working with Jen [Majura, guitar] remotely. But now I'm still here, finishing lyrics, working on keyboards, working on vocals. So we're still ongoing."

According to Amy, it is still unclear as to when "The Bitter Truth" will be made available in its entirety. "We don't have a release date, but I kind of like to look at it like it's happening now," she explained. "The idea behind this whole thing was always to just go one at a time, release it a little at a time, in real time with the fans while it's still going on and it's still fresh, and just live in the moment more. So in my mind, it is being released — this is part of it. We live in a new world where it's not all about just dropping a big pile of music all at once. People don't always consume music that way — I don't. So I still wanna make an album — that's part of who we are, and I think that's important to our fans, that we're doing that — and we'll drop the back half, or whatever, soon. But I don't have a date, 'cause I never wanna put a date down while I'm still writing, 'cause I don't wanna get to the last minute and be, like, 'Anything. Just put some words down.' I can't do that. It has to be right, and sometimes it takes a minute."

Lee went on to say that the musical direction of the new EVANESCENCE material is substantially different from 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.

"It's definitely not orchestral," Amy said. "We haven't put a single string down yet. There's a lot of guitars. We're kind of letting the pendulum swing back. We went that way, and that was beautiful, and God, that was special — that experience with 'Synthesis' — but that's all really just been setting us up to come back in full force with the more rock side of who we are. So I'm honestly enjoying sound design and programming and synthesizers a lot more than the idea of a live orchestra right now. It doesn't mean that we won't find something where we're, like, 'We need a little string section on this,' or whatever, but we haven't reached that point yet."

Earlier this month, EVANESCENCE released a new single, "Use My Voice", which was written to celebrate the power of speaking out in order to promote more justice in the world. The track, featuring contributions from THE PRETTY RECKLESS's Taylor Momsen and HALESTORM's Lzzy Hale, was chosen by HeadCount in the USA to encourage voters to register, check their registration, or find out about their remote voting options amid the COVID-19 pandemic at UseMyVoice.org.