Will Evanescence Be Classic Rock Someday?

It’s now been more than 20 years since Evanescence made their major label debut with 2003’s Fallen, an album which spawned hit singles like “Bring Me to Life” and “My Immortal.” It was a heady time, as the record eventually sold more than four million copies and snared two Grammy Awards.

For vocalist Amy Lee, it’s been an interesting ride, watching her band’s music find an audience with different generations, mirroring her own discovery process with classic rock as she was growing up. It’s something she couldn’t have imagined in the group’s early days, when there was an “urgent anxiety” which drove a unified hope that they could find a way somehow to survive. “To have stuck around throughout that time and written more music and done more albums, and been around the world a lot of times, and met all these people and have a chance to grow and ripen and just become layered and deeper and more storied, [means a lot],” she tells the UCR Podcast. “Now we’re at a point where when we make new music, it’s especially powerful.”

“Because when we go out on the road and we do our thing that we do, I feel like we have the power of [sharing with the audience], here’s something new,” she continues. “Here’s something that we’re more excited about than anything right now, but at the same time, we’re still that ‘Bring Me to Life’ band. We still get nostalgic with you, so we’re gonna go through this with all of that on our back. It’s cool because we’re at the point now where there isn’t a fear [of survival] — we did it and now it’s just fun. Now we can just keep making music and have it mean more.”

Watch Evanescence’s ‘Bring Me to Life’ Video

What is Evanescence Doing Now?

After several solid years of road work behind 2021’s The Bitter Truth, Lee and her bandmates have been hard at work on songs with producer Nick Raskulinecz (Rush, Alice in Chains, Foo Fighters), who also worked with them previously on that album. It’s a relationship that she values a lot and one that is beneficial on a number of levels. “I think a great producer is a lot of things at once. He’s a coach and like counselor, also just a real friend,” Lee explains. “Nick is also a multi-instrumentalist. I think being a musician in the first place is something that is such an asset when it comes to being a producer. Because they can not only tell you, ‘Oh, this is what’s wrong with this, or it needs this and that,’ but they can really spell it out or sing it or strum something on the guitar. He can be an idea man to push you in a direction or help you see what could be more about the song. He really gets his hands dirty and gets in there with us all of the way.”

While it won’t appear on the forthcoming album, fans can currently get a taste of where the band is presently thanks to “Afterlife,” a new song which was released earlier this week. The track is part of the soundtrack for Devil May Cry, a new Netflix animated series based on the Capcom video game franchise of the same name. It has an appropriately supernatural feel that will appeal to fans of not only the group, but those who loved similarly spooky music heard in the ’90s on movies and shows like The X-Files, Charmed and The Craft.

The whole thing was a happy accident as Lee shares. With the band already “in creative mode” for the next album, she got an invitation last year from Netflix, wanting to know if she wanted to work with collaborator Alex Seaver, who’d already started working on a song for the series. “It sounded really cool already,” she says now. “And it kind of was a snowball effect. It started out like, ‘Oh, maybe you could sing on this thing. Then, it was like, maybe this is an Evanescence song. It turned into something that we’re all so excited about and it feels so good to have new music.”

Watch Evanescence’s ‘Afterlife’ Video