The American rock band Evanescence faced a problem that would have buried most groups: their label listened to a finished set of songs and said none were good enough. That was the original version of the band's third studio album, Evanescence, which finally appeared on 11 October 2011 through Wind-up Records. By then the record had been through a false start with a famous producer, a long silence, and a complete rethink of how the band worked. The result was their first album written by the whole lineup, and it opened at the very top of the American chart.
The Lillywhite sessions fall apart
The trouble began after the tour for their previous album, The Open Door. Singer Amy Lee stepped away from music for a while, painting, listening to folk and indie, and learning to play the harp. When she came back, the band started recording in 2010 with producer Steve Lillywhite, who had reached out to the label himself because he wanted to work with Lee. But the sessions did not click. Lee later said Lillywhite simply did not fit the group and the material was not coming together the right way.
Some of those early songs were stripped down and programmed, and Lee felt they belonged on a solo project rather than an Evanescence record. So the band stopped. Lee announced the pause to get into the right creative headspace, and the label's president backed her decision to start over. That meant throwing away months of work. Only three songs from the original project survived into the final album, which is a brutal ratio for any band to accept.
Writing as a full band
What changed everything was a decision about how to write. On earlier Evanescence records, Lee had always composed alone or with one collaborator. For this album, the whole group wrote together: Lee, guitarists Terry Balsamo and Troy McLawhorn, bassist Tim McCord, and drummer Will Hunt. They jammed, reworked old ideas, and built new material collectively. That shift from a singer's vision to a band's process gave the record a different weight, and it became the first Evanescence album credited to the full lineup.
The band returned to the studio in April 2011 with producer Nick Raskulinecz. This time the sessions moved quickly, and the first single, "What You Want," arrived in August. When the album itself came out that October, the response was immediate. In its first week in the United States it sold 127,000 copies and landed at number one on the Billboard 200. It also topped four other Billboard charts: Rock Albums, Digital Albums, Alternative Albums, and Hard Rock Albums.
The album's cover announced the change just as clearly as the music did. It was the first Evanescence cover without Amy Lee's face on it. Instead, the sleeve was black with steam drifting behind the band's name, a nod to the word "evanescence" itself, which means to vanish like vapor. After years of being seen as Lee plus backing musicians, the band was presenting itself as a unit, and the image matched that idea.
The stakes had been high from the start. A rejected album, a departed producer, and a label in what Lee called uncertain times could have ended the project quietly. Instead, Evanescence became the band's first number-one record in the United States, proof that scrapping something that does not work can be the most productive move a group makes. The album that almost did not exist ended up defining a new version of the band.