Five years on from The Bitter Truth, and twenty-three since Fallen turned Amy Lee into one of rock’s most recognisable voices, Sanctuary arrives with a notable shift in collaborator. Jordan Fish, late of Bring Me the Horizon, takes a production role here, and his fingerprints are audible from the off, though rarely in the way you might expect. Rather than rewriting Evanescence’s identity, Fish seems to have located the gaps in their established sound and filled them with electronic detail, glitches and textures that nudge the band somewhere newer without disrupting what they do best.
Opener “Beautiful Lie” sets the tone immediately, with Lee in commanding, unapologetic form. There’s a defiance running through much of the record’s first half, particularly on “Tell Me When You’ve Had Enough” and lead single “Who Will You Follow”, both of which trade in the kind of towering, slightly theatrical catharsis that has always been Evanescence’s calling card, but with the production pushed into harder, more modern territory. “Afterlife” is another in that mould, all churning guitars and scale, the sort of song built for arenas, which is timely given the band’s autumn UK dates.
The ballads, inevitably, are where Lee’s voice does its most affecting work. “How Do I Heal” is stark and unguarded in a way that recalls her earliest, most vulnerable material, while “Forever Without You” finds her somewhere she’s rarely been before: settled. There’s a calm running through it that feels less like resignation and more like genuine peace, which after two decades of turbulent, public-facing drama feels like real movement, not just a change of scenery. The title track, meanwhile, splits the difference between the two modes, pairing sparse piano with electronic fracture and some of Lee’s most controlled, simmering vocal work on the record.
Not everything sticks the landing. “Calm Down” leans further into its glitchy textures than the song can really support, and “Self Destruct” feels like a sketch that wandered onto the tracklist rather than a fully realised song. These moments don’t derail the record, but they do stand out precisely because everything around them is so assured.
What’s most impressive about Sanctuary is how it manages to sound both familiar and restless at once. Evanescence have never been a band to chase trends, and they aren’t doing so here either, but there’s a willingness to experiment that suggests a band still curious about their own sound rather than coasting on past glories. It’s not a reinvention, but it doesn’t need to be. With this return, we rediscover a band finding new corners of a sound they’ve spent over twenty years perfecting.
