WITHIN TEMPTATION vocalist Sharon den Adel says the band's next studio album will mark the most drastic stylistic shift of its career, telling Metal Hammer Germany in a new interview that listeners should brace for something unrecognizable.
“Well, I think, of course, things have changed — musically a lot, I think,” she said of the band's trajectory. “How we started, we grew up with the music and, yeah, always followed new influences that we enjoyed very much and implemented that into our music with the style that we already had.”
That gradual absorption of outside influence is a fair description of WITHIN TEMPTATION's last decade: the group has steadily folded electronics, industrial textures and modern pop production into the gothic and symphonic metal template it helped define in the late 1990s. What is coming next, den Adel suggests, is a different order of change altogether.
“But this time, what's coming up next, it's gonna be huge,” she said. “It's such a different thing we're gonna do that… I know I love it, what we're gonna do, but I hope everyone else is not gonna be completely blown away in a bad way, and I hope they will be blown away in a good way. But the sound is gonna completely change with the next album. Like 100% difference.”
Pressed for specifics, den Adel declined, pointing out that the record is still being built and that its final shape has not settled. “The thing is, why I can't tell you yet is because we're still recording and still developing, so it can still change a little bit here and there,” she said.
The Netherlands-based band has released eight studio albums since forming in 1996, moving more than four million records and headlining major European festivals including Download and Wacken Open Air. Its most recent full-length, “Bleed Out”, arrived in 2023 and was framed around political and humanitarian themes, including a track written in direct response to russia's war against Ukraine.
Den Adel's warning is unusually blunt for a band of WITHIN TEMPTATION's commercial standing — acts at that level rarely telegraph a total reinvention before a single note is public. Whether that means a heavier record, a lighter one, or something outside metal's borders entirely, the band is not saying yet. No title or release window has been announced.