Evanescence announced Friday it will release The Bitter Truth, its fifth studio album, over the course of the year.
The process begins with the debut of “Wasted on You.”
“We were recording this music right up until we couldn’t go into the studio anymore and finished it remotely through file sharing and phone calls,” singer Amy Lee explained, in a release. “Tweaking mixes, adding background vocals, creating the video and album art all from home has been like water in the dessert for me, my light in a dark time.
“We are still writing and have a lot more work to do on this album, but this time we wanted to release the songs individually, as we create, to live more in the moment with our fans and our music.”
Lee said “Wasted on You” was not supposed to be the first single but its lyrics about the internal ups and downs people go through seemed particularly apt during the COVID-19 crisis.
“I didn’t write these lyrics about what we’re all now going through,” she said, “but somehow that’s exactly what they are."
Lee sings: “I don’t need drugs / I’m already six feet low / Wasted on you / Waiting for a miracle / I can’t move on / Feels like we’re frozen in time.”
The video for the track was shot on iPhones by each member of the band – Lee, bassist Tim McCord, drummer Will Hunt, lead guitarist Troy McLawhorn and guitarist Jen Majura – while in isolation with their families. The clips were edited together by director P.R. Brown.
“We can’t be together to make a video right now,” Lee said, “but we took that and used it to tell the story of our real lives in this moment, and to show that although we are apart, we are all still connected.”
Lee conceded that a global pandemic is a “terrible time” to release music, at least in a commercial sense. But the members of Evanescence believe “people need music now more than ever.”
She added: “We’re not going to wait to share it because who knows what tomorrow brings? Who knows if it even comes? This is who we really are and we’re calling out across the world for a connection.”
The Bitter Truth is the first collection of new original music by Evanescence in nine years.