EVANESCENCE's new album, "The Bitter Truth", has charted at No. 4 in the U.K., making it the band's fourth Top Five album in the country. EVANESCENCE's first full-length release of all-new material in a decade, "The Bitter Truth" has also debuted as the top-selling rock and alternative album in the U.S., according to Nielsen Music Connect.
Shortly after its release on March 26, "The Bitter Truth" rose to the top of the iTunes album charts in 22 countries. Recorded during the pandemic, it confronts the dark realities of the world head-on. Yet its resounding message is one of light, and that pushing through is better than giving up.
EVANESCENCE's new music was produced by Nick Raskulinecz, who also worked on 2011's self-titled LP.
When asked in a 2020 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 in 2019 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."
