EVANESCENCE will celebrate the 20th anniversary of its classic debut album, “Fallen”, on an Australian tour this summer. The five-date trek, which will launch in late August, will mark the band’s first Australian tour since their sublime run with local symphony orchestras in 2018.
Starting life when EVANESCENCE vocalist Amy Lee and co-founder Ben Moody began writing and recording songs in the mid-1990s, 2003’s “Fallen” would go on to score five nominations at the 2004 Grammy Awards, winning “Best Hard Rock Performance” and “Best New Artist”, with the album’s symphonic and delicate ballad “My Immortal” also scoring an additional nomination at the Grammy Awards the following year.
Hitting the top 10 charts in multiple countries upon its release, including Australia and a No. 1 in the U.K., “Fallen” sold 10 million copies in the U.S. alone, with over 17 million copies sold worldwide and officially reaching diamond certification in late 2022.
“Fallen”‘s lush and gloomy beauty memorably blended symphonic elements with goth, rock, metal and hooks aplenty, while also garnering significant attention for lead singles “Bring Me To Life”, “Going Under”, “My Immortal” and “Everybody’s Fool”. And while the album has gone on to be included in the likes of Rolling Stone‘s “The 100 Greatest Metal Albums Of All Time” and praise lauded for Lee’s macabre tinge that set the band apart from their nu metal contemporaries at the time, “Fallen” also ultimately set the scene for a long-term legacy from the Arkansas-hailing group, who are now in command of five studio albums including 2021’s powerful and intimate outing “The Bitter Truth” which debuted at No. 3 on the ARIA chart, which marked the band’s highest debut in 15 years.
Following multiple worldwide tours, “The Open Door” followed “Fallen”‘s footsteps, going on to sell more than five million copies, before the self-titled “Evanescence” in 2011 debuted at No. 1 on the ARIA album chart and Billboard chart. EVANESCENCE went down both very new and familiar paths for their fourth and most ambitious release to date, “Synthesis”, in 2017 alongside a worldwide “Synthesis Live” tour combining their intense live performances and timeless songwriting with a powerful live orchestra, before unveiling “The Bitter Truth” in 2021, hitting the top 10 of multiple international album charts and marking itself on multiple “Best Of 2021” release lists worldwide.
General tickets go on sale on Thursday, June 1 at 9 a.m. local time.
Tour dates:
Aug. 24 – Riverstage, Brisbane
Aug. 26 – Qudos Bank Arena, Sydney
Aug. 28 – AEC Theatre, Adelaide
Aug. 30 – Rod Laver Arena, Melbourne
Sep. 02 – Red Hill Auditorium, Perth
Asked in a 2022 interview with Rock Sound if there were any plans for EVANESCENCE to commemorate “Fallen”‘s 20th anniversary in 2023, Lee said: “I do have an idea. It’s gonna take a little bit of work. But I think it probably won’t be what everybody expects. I think everybody just is, ‘Oh, why don’t you do a show that’s, like, [playing] the album front to back?’ We’ve been playing so many shows, I would rather do something that, to me… I don’t know. I don’t wanna give it away, in case it doesn’t work out. Maybe I’ll do nothing. Expect nothing, and then if I do something, you’ll be really, really grateful. [Laughs]”
Amy also talked about the fact that “Bring Me To Life” experienced a resurgence last summer, 19 years after its original release. The song, which initially reached No. 5 on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100 and was EVANESCENCE‘s first U.K. No. 1 single, reached No. 1 on the U.S. iTunes chart in August 2022.
“It is satisfying,” Lee said about the track’s renewed popularity. “And it’s cool now, because I remember a lot of the feeling in the beginning. It was so much about, like, ‘What’s next?’ And, ‘Are we gonna be able to make it?’ And, ‘Are we gonna be able to survive?’ And, ‘Are people gonna listen to our next song?’ And, ‘What about the next record?’ And just getting to the next place always.
“There is an element to a song like ‘Bring Me To Life’ that didn’t exist before, which is this nostalgia,” she explained. “The song has grown live. It’s something that we’ve added to. But part of how it’s grown is with its history and with what it means to everybody in the room. It’s not something new; it’s just something that you already have known for so long that has a place in your heart. It’s just able to be more than it would have been then. So I, in a lot of ways, love it more than I did.”
The success of “Fallen” led to turmoil within the group, as Moody left in late 2003, leaving Lee as the only original member of the band.
Lee continued with new members, and EVANESCENCE issued “The Open Door” in 2006. While a hit, it did not equal the sales of “Fallen”. Lee told The Pulse Of Radio at the time that she wasn’t concerned about matching the previous album’s success. “I just haven’t ever looked at it that way,” she said. “‘Fallen’ is a great record, but I don’t think you can try to match the success of another body of work. I think that’s only gonna frustrate you. And if, honestly if what you really care about is record sales and money, there’s no way you’re gonna make a great piece of art, because then you’re just gonna get all confused and make something ingenuine.”
In February 2022, EVANESCENCE‘s music video for “Bring Me To Life” — which featured guest vocals from Paul McCoy of 12 STONES — surpassed one billion views on YouTube. The Philipp Stölzl-directed clip, which was uploaded to YouTube in December of 2009, was filmed in Romania in January 2003. It features Lee in a night gown and barefoot, in her room, inside a tall building in the city at night. The rest of the band is playing on a higher floor of the building.
In March 2021, Lee told Alternative Press that EVANESCENCE‘s original record label Wind Up threatened not to release “Fallen” if she and her bandmates didn’t add a male voice to lead single “Bring Me To Life” to make it more palatable for radio.