EVANESCENCE's AMY LEE Explains 'The Bitter Truth' Album Title

Late last month, EVANESCENCE has released "Wasted On You", the first original song from the band in nine years. The track and its accompanying video are from "The Bitter Truth", the band's upcoming fourth studio album and first all-new one since 2011.

"Wasted On You" is the first in a series of songs that the band will release from "The Bitter Truth" incrementally, culminating in the release of the full album. If all goes well, the band hopes to tour later this year.

When asked in a new 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, singer Amy Lee said (see video below): "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.

"We are still writing, and it's not all down, so it's hard to sum it up… but 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."

The video for "Wasted On You" was shot by each band member — Lee, bassist Tim McCord, drummer Will Hunt, lead guitarist Troy McLawhorn and guitarist Jen Majura — on their iPhones while currently in isolation at their homes.

EVANESCENCE's new music is being produced by Nick Raskulinecz, who also worked on 2011's self-titled LP.

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.

Photo credit: P.R. Brown