ARCH ENEMY frontwoman Alissa White-Gluz has revealed to Metal Hammer magazine that she moved to southern Germany temporarily during the pandemic in order to work on the band's upcoming album, "Deceivers", which is scheduled for a July 29 release via Century Media. "I ended up staying in Europe for an entire year," she said. "I didn't want to risk being far away from our hub, which is basically in Sweden and Germany, and not being able to get back to it. I rented a car and found a little home for myself in southern Germany; I stayed there for a whole year. I set up a studio down there and continued working on a lot of solo material." Asked if this means her long-in-the-works solo debut will finally arrive in the not-too-distant future, Alissa said: "Yeah, I'm working on that, but it's gonna come out way after 'Deceivers'. The ARCH ENEMY album is the one people should be looking forward to right now." Back in 2017, Alissa said that her debut solo album would feature collaborations with a member of KAMELOT and at least one of her bandmates in ARCH ENEMY. The ARCH ENEMY frontwoman said that the idea for a solo project came about as a suggestion from the band's former lead singer Angela Gossow, who has been managing ARCH ENEMY's career for more than a decade and also oversees Alissa's personal affairs. "[Angela] was, like, 'Well, you need something. You need something that you can do, because I know you're a workaholic and you're not gonna be able to just sit there like this waiting for the next ARCH ENEMY tour,'" Alissa told France's Duke TV. "And she's totally right — I needed something else to be able to work on. And also, I have a lot of ideas that maybe don't sound like ARCH ENEMY and it would be kind of silly to just force them into ARCH ENEMY." According to White-Gluz, her debut solo album will be released under the ALISSA banner because she wanted to "keep it simple" and "make it very clear who it is and what it is." In order to make the disc, Alissa "did a huge life overhaul," which included building a studio and investing a lot of time and money into learning how to engineer and record, program drums and improving at playing guitar. "Of course, on the album itself we're gonna have real musicians playing all of these things, but in terms of just getting the style down and the songwriting, it's something that I need to start on my own," she explained to Duke TV. At the time of the Duke TV interview, half of Alissa's solo effort had been written, and it contained some musical surprises. "It doesn't really sound like ARCH ENEMY — it's pretty different — but I think it's pretty cool," she said. "For example, a song that I'm writing with Oliver [Palotai, keyboards] from KAMELOT doesn't sound like KAMELOT and it doesn't sound like ARCH ENEMY, but it's members of both." Former NEVERMORE guitarist Jeff Loomis, who joined ARCH ENEMY in late 2014, didn't have any of his songwriting ideas included on the latter band's last album, "Will To Power", but will play a prominent role on Alissa's upcoming disc. "Jeff didn't write with Michael [Amott, ARCH ENEMY guitarist and main songwriter], because Michael was already writing so well with Daniel [Erlandsson, ARCH ENEMY drummer] that we just actually had too many ideas," White-Gluz told France's Loud TV in a separate interview. "But all of Jeff's ideas are really good and I've heard them and they're gonna be released, so people will hear them… Jeff is gonna be one of my collaborators on my solo project, because how can you say no to that? [Laughs]"
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