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Evanescence drop new single Who Will You Follow, announce sixth album Sanctuary
Evanescence’s sixth album Sanctuary – the follow-up to 2021’s The Bitter Truth – will arrive this summer. Listen to new single Who Will You Follow now…
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Evanescence: “A lot of the album is the quest for humanity and being able to connect on what is real amidst a flood of lies”
With a world tour booked and their highly-anticipated new studio album on the way, multi-platinum rock titans Evanescence are gearing up for one of their biggest years ever. But it’s taken a lot of soul-searching to get to this point. Here, iconic singer Amy Lee tells K! how Sanctuary will tackle a world in turmoil head-on…
- Words:
- George Garner
- Photography:
- Jonathan Weiner
There is so much to talk about, but only one place to begin: the woman being burned alive at the stake on Amy Lee’s grisly T-shirt. “Oh, you like that?” grins Evanescence’s singer, as K! remarks on the disturbing illustration. “That’s where I’m at!”
Here, Amy – sat in her home studio, surrounded by instruments and platinum plaques – proceeds to stand up and afford us a better view of this fiery death. “This is where the patriarchy is at, okay?” she says, issuing a serious point with a laugh. “I’m fighting the flames!”
As it just so happens, this isn’t the only predicament Amy’s been facing lately. She’s also been weathering a rather unique category of storm. “It’s a wild and beautiful one, but at least it’s a storm that I caused myself,” she clarifies. “So that’s rare (laughs).”
The storm in question goes by the name of Sanctuary – Evanescence’s eagerly-awaited new studio album. It was always planned to be out in time for the start of their world tour this summer. The deadlines were going to be tight, but Amy told her band – completed by guitarists Troy McLawhorn and Tim McCord, drummer Will Hunt and new bassist Emma (“I can’t even tell you much I love her”) Anzai – and her team there could be no excuses. Evanescence would be touring a newly-released record, and Amy was willing to stay up all night, every night, to make it happen.
“Ever since then, my life’s been like, ‘I said I could handle it, but can I handle it?’” she reflects. “I didn’t know.”
When she recalls January 2026, she explains how she was working around the clock.
“I was walking in the woods, being irritable,” she winces. “I’m a crazy person when I’m trying to finish lyrics.”
Well, the good news is that when your correspondent greets the ever-personable Amy, it is the day after Evanescence finally met the deadline that’s governed her every waking moment. Sanctuary will arrive on June 5. “It’s done, but it was down to the wire on every single level!” Amy quips with the kind of slightly nervous, slightly cheeky laugh that speaks volumes about the relief she’s feeling. It’s clear we’re meeting her just as the stress is melting away. She’s even managed to enjoy a normal morning. Ish. She got up at 6:20am, dropped her kid off at school and has been going over the extras for the bonus edition of Sanctuary (“It comes with a DVD… wait, is that even a word anymore? It’s a circular piece of plastic!”).
Crucially, Amy’s also been listening to (rather than working on) Sanctuary, albeit in a somewhat less romantic way than she first played Evanescence’s last album, 2021’s The Bitter Truth. For that record, she snuck out of the house at night, climbed into a treehouse in her garden and put it on beneath the stars. That wasn’t an option this time.
“That treehouse has been torn down,” she explains. “It’s so sad, but the tree was dying and we had to take it down before it hurt someone.”
Sanctuary has, instead, been given a new type of listening ritual.
“I’m a pacer,” Amy reveals. “So, just now, I had it on my headphones and I paced around the yard and the house (laughs). I listened to it all the way through to get my head in the right space before this interview.”
Amy Lee has been known to be very tough on Amy Lee over the years. She detests listening back to recordings of herself performing live, for instance, but insists on doing it. “I need to criticise it like no-one else could,” she says of her own meticulous standards. So what, then, is the official verdict on Sanctuary from someone who’s never been predisposed for bouts of self-flattery?
“It’s so good,” she beams. “I’m so proud of it. It’s always a quest to be the most honest I can be. It’s hard to explain, because every time [Evanescence release a record] I’m like, ‘I did it!’ But I’ve grown, and more has happened. There’s more to say, more to express and more to expose. Every time, it’s all about how real can it get.”
Now, about that title. Officially, the name of Evanescence’s new album was revealed to the world on April 10, 2026. In reality, Amy Lee leaked it to everyone – including herself – onstage in November 2025.
“It’s funny, we were on tour in Australia last fall, and it just came out of my mouth,” she says. “I said, ‘This is our sanctuary, we find comfort and connection through the power of music.’”
After the show, that word quickly crystallised as the Evanescence record title. But there is another dimension to it that needs consideration here. There is also the question of what music is a sanctuary from…
“From the beginning, we were all pushing each other on from The Bitter Truth to the next level,” Amy recalls of autumn 2024, when Evanescence reconvened with their beloved producer Nick Raskulinecz (Deftones, Foo Fighters, Korn). “And it was right when the shit hit the fan.”
When Donald Trump was confirmed to have been re-elected as the U.S. president, Evanescence were in the studio together. “It just stunned us, I mean, it stunned me…” she says. Amy immediately ripped up the chorus she had been working on. “The words just poured out,” she explains. “I showed up the next day, like, ‘I got a new chorus! This is what this is now!’”
K! has not heard Sanctuary yet, in accordance with Amy’s plan to keep it as close to her chest at this stage as possible (“Sorry!” she apologises). But she does give us a private a capella rendition of the chorus in question. ‘They don’t give a damn about us!’ she belts – in that brilliant, soaring voice – as she sings the hook of About Us. Even without music, it sounds massive.
“From the beginning, we were all pushing each other on from The Bitter Truth to the next level”
Amy’s always been a deeply conscientious person and lyricist; this, after all, is someone who was inspired to write 2011 song My Heart Is Broken after being involved with a New York organisation that rescued victims of sex trafficking. Even then, The Bitter Truth marked a noticeable intensification of her public voice, with Amy speaking out about topics from #MeToo to racism and voter registration. Shortly after Trump’s second inauguration, however, in a candid post offering words of hope for worried people, she explained why she’d been much quieter online than before. She was, she explained, working out how best to deploy her energy and voice in a way that would really cut through. It would be wrong to misconstrue her social media silence at that time for complicity.
“I’m aware of what’s going on in the world, it’s so fucked-up,” she explains today. “Instead of channeling my energy into talking to people on Instagram about how we need to fight – and that is not to shade people using their voice on social media, because we need to do that – there is already so much of that… I know that music has the power to affect people. For me personally, I can do more by channeling all of that energy into music instead of spending time on social media saying the right words and trying to not get freaked out by the way people misinterpret those words.”
Music, she decided, would be her primary vehicle for reaching people this time around.
“Unfortunately for me, that takes time, and I really have to think my words through,” she continues. “Turn on the news and you can get inspired to write a heavy rock song with plenty of rage, especially as a woman. It’s just really hard, because I’m not political. I don’t want this. This was put upon us all. How we react and respond to this moment has nothing to do with if we want to be a ‘political voice’. I absolutely do not, but I do want to rise to the moment. We don’t have a choice. We’ve been forced into this situation where if we don’t speak up and fight back against tyranny, against human rights violations, against blowing people up, we’re next.”
Sanctuary’s excellent lead single Who Will You Follow? is a powerful example: a warning to anyone becoming desensitised to uncorroborated slop passing as facts.
“It’s about the quest for what is real,” she says. “For me, a lot of the album is the quest for humanity and being able to connect on what is real amidst a flood of lies being shoved in our face. Somebody else is literally profiting off of you believing a lie. It is just wild out there. I want us to find each other in reality, dark as it may be, because you can’t fix it until you face it.”
To this end, Amy’s also found new allies in this battle. Eagle-eyed song credit lurkers will observe that said single is produced not by Nick Raskulinecz, but rather Zakk Cervini (Bad Omens, YUNGBLUD, Spiritbox) and Jordan Fish (Bring Me The Horizon, Poppy, Architects). For the first time, Evanescence have multiple producers on a studio album. This is something Amy always dreamed about, of what would happen if they just “let each song be what it wants to be”.
It takes a certain type of person to gel with Amy Lee in the studio: “I either bug people to shit or they love it,” is her own self-evaluation. In Zakk and Jordan, Evanescence found two collaborators who love it. Amy had already worked with them both before. Zakk was the mixing engineer on the band’s epic song Afterlife (taken from the Netflix series Devil May Cry, and which also appears on Sanctuary). “He got us right away,” she applauds. Likewise, with Jordan, the pair spent time together working on Bring Me The Horizon/Amy Lee collab One Day The Only Butterflies Left Will Be In Your Chest As You March Towards Death and their Download Festival 2023 live duet. Here, Amy gets a bit, well, cosmic.
“I can’t really put my finger on this, but making music together is spiritual,” she says, reflecting on the conversation she had with Jordan after Download. “I just looked him in the eyes at the end of the night, like, ‘I don’t know why, but I know we’re supposed to make music together.’”
It didn’t happen right away. Then, one day, Zakk told Amy he was in the studio and suggested she should drop by with Troy. Oh, and by the way, Jordan Fish would be there, too… The universe provides.
“We were meant to write together,” she reaffirms today, with a glint in her eye. “This album is evidence of that. We cracked through the mine and found the diamonds.”
“I looked Jordan Fish in the eyes like, ‘I don’t know why, but I know we’re supposed to make music together’”
If her love and trust for her collaborators shines through here, it should also be noted that for all the tough themes being addressed on Sanctuary, she hasn’t lost faith in humanity either.
“I’ve seen millions of people around the world have a heart and care more about the people they love and other souls than they do about how much money they can get out of somebody, or how famous they can get by stepping on someone else, or how much power,” she reasons. “That is, unfortunately, the few that have wormed their way into power around the world. The majority of people, I believe, have a heart and soul. I hope that’s true. I don’t know how to keep going if that’s not true.”
To this end, and while no song on Sanctuary was easy to write, one did perhaps require the most of her personally.
“In that fall of 2024, that new burst of angst and rage was good fuel,” she says. “I was on that trip for a good while. But with Wide Open Heart, there’s a reason it’s the last song on the album. Instead of being about the fight, it’s about the strength in our open hearts. That’s the thing they can’t take unless you let them: your soul, your ability to emit love and compassion when you’re up against hate. That song took some personal growth.”
Time for a lesser known fact about Amy Lee. She is shit at taking holidays. Not proper ones, anyway.
“I don’t book trips where I’m gonna leave my house and go have fun – never!” she laughs. “We’re always traveling for work, so we’re never like, ‘Let’s go on a family vacation.’ We just make a vacation out of tour – they meet me and we’ll stay an extra day together.”
“Amy brings this up because this year she broke her own rule. This spring, when the deadline pressure for Sanctuary was at its peak, she quite literally said “fuck it” and went on a family holiday.
“My son’s dreamed of going to Hawaii his whole life,” she explains. “I said, ‘Let’s just book it, I’ll make it work.’”
And so, with songs still to finish, Amy, her husband and son went there. It rained half the time, but they still enjoyed being tourists. A chocolate farm was visited, FYI. But between the torrential downpours, Amy completed a key song on Sanctuary: How Will I Heal. It’s “a beautiful, sweet, heartfelt” track, but also one she’d been threatening to cut from the album because there was already a ballad. Jordan and Zakk were having none of it. They insisted that she finish it.
“There couldn’t have been a more beautiful setting,” Amy recalls of writing its lyrics. “I sat outside our room under an umbrella in the rain and let the words come to me as I reflected on life. Nature always inspires me. Nothing’s more beautiful than island life, feeling like the world is huge and ancient, and that our problems are small and the things that matter are just so much deeper than me finishing an album on time. It gave me the space to appreciate the beauty in grief. I kind of wrote it about missing New York, not just as a city, but my time there, the life spent there, and the people that I lost that I spent time with there.”
“Nature always inspires me. Nothing’s more beautiful than island life, feeling like the world is huge and ancient…”
Amy’s relationship with time, indeed with her past, has changed a lot in recent years. The devastating loss of her younger brother Robby – who battled severe epilepsy throughout his life – in January 2018 had already put things sharply into perspective. So, too, did the 20th anniversary celebration of Fallen. There was joy in the global outpouring of love for their classic debut, but also painful memories that needed renegotiating. The public fallouts with band members. Music industry misogyny. Media judgement and criticism.
“Having to go revisit the past was good for me, and it was hard,” Amy reflects. “And there’s a song [on Sanctuary] that came out of that time. I don’t want to harp on it, because it’s nothing like the rest of the record, but there’s a moment that is really, really important to me that is just processing, and in a way that I couldn’t do until over 20 years later. It’s about being able to see the full picture, good and bad, balm and wound, it’s just raw. I can’t put it into any better words than I did in the song, so you’ll just have to listen to Forever Without You. I really don’t want to give away too much. People are gonna know what it’s about.”
As talk of some challenging times emerges here, K! recalls Amy’s earlier comment about fighting the patriarchy. Will Evanescence be putting a dent into it on any songs on Sanctuary?
“Oh, I don’t know,” she sighs. “Who knows if that gets dented… All I can do is sing from the heart. I want off this ride, and all I can do is sing about it. And we tell it like it is, we’re not sugar coating it!”
Amy can at least – and especially when contrasted with her memories of a 2003 rock scene where she would often find herself the only woman onstage at festivals – take comfort in how she is levelling the playing field in her own way. In 2025 alone, she collaborated with Halsey on Hand That Feeds, with Poppy and Spiritbox’s Courtney LaPlante on End Of You, and with K.Flay on Fight Like A Girl. Likewise, Evanescence have recruited Spiritbox, Nova Twins, K.Flay and Poppy on different legs of their upcoming world tour. Amy takes great pride in this.
“The more that we lift each other up and support each other, the more of an impact I feel like we’re making in each other’s lives, for the girls watching, and for everybody watching,” she nods. “I love the rock’n’roll sisterhood.”
This sisterhood includes, of course, her real sister, too. Amy’s buzzing about Carrie Lee South’s debut novel In the Woods They Wait arriving later this year. “It’s so good,” she beams. “I’m so proud of her!” And that’s without mentioning Evanescence’s latest member, Emma Anzai.
“Emma and I, as women in this time, in this world and in this industry, have been through things together that only the two of us within this could really connect on, on that level,” she says. “Having her on these songs is so important and so powerful. I can hear her spirit all over this record, through the bass, but also in her vocals.”
Having spent over an hour with Amy, the feeling is of an artist recharged, of the joy in Evanescence being active. This is quite the contrast to previous incarnations of the band. “We really like to take the time that it takes to find the songs and to find the heart of the album and let it develop naturally, much to our fans’ agony sometimes,” Amy concedes.
Yet with the array of unexpected collaborations of late, a lot of touring, and Sanctuary’s imminent arrival, Evanescence seem to be… speeding up?
“Part of it is growing up,” Amy says. “You realise how fast time goes more and more, but also, I don’t want to waste the amazing thing that we have with where the band’s at right now. We love making music together. We didn’t finish touring The Bitter Truth and felt burned out and ready for a break. Midway through touring we were already writing. I think part of it also has to do with getting older and not being like, ‘Oh, I’m gonna take a sabbatical, wander off and come back when I’m 50.’ I don’t have time for that, we’ve got to do this now. Now! I literally could not be here tomorrow. So let’s do it right now.”
The timing is right in another sense, too. Like Deftones and Korn, Evanescence have witnessed the resurgence of alternative music first-hand. They’ve seen younger fans attending shows who weren’t even alive in 2003 embracing not only millennial alternative music, but also its fashion staples. This is great news for Amy’s wardrobe.
“I still have that shit from before, so I don’t even have to go shopping,” she laughs.
But she has her own theory on what’s happening culturally.
“You know what? In the ’90s through to the early ’00s, what alternative music was about for me was authenticity,” she posits. “As we’re going into this era of deepfakes, AI, lies, questioning reality and everything being photoshopped to shit, we’re craving something real. Let me see the flaws. Let me see the real picture. I want to see a painting painted by somebody with their hand, not digitally perfected. Musically, alternative rock in the ’90s and early ’00s was about how raw, real and unusual it was. People reaching towards that makes perfect sense right now.”
And that means Sanctuary might just be the perfect album for these times.
“I can’t wait for you to hear it,” Amy says. “When you do, let’s talk again. These words are the best that I can give of myself. They’re the rawest and truest that I can give.”
Sanctuary is released June 5 via Columbia/Music For Nations. Evanescence return to the UK between September 8-13.
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