Maria Brink has been talking about a solo album since 2017. It now has a name and a place in the schedule.
Speaking to James Wilson-Taylor of U.K. magazine Rock Sound, the IN THIS MOMENT frontwoman confirmed that the record is happening and that it is not waiting for a gap in the band's cycle — it is being made inside one. "I am doing my first solo project between" the band's recently released ninth album, "Witch", and their next LP, she said. The project has a title: "Maria Brink's COVEN — I'm gonna call it COVEN, and that's gonna be my first thing that I've done." Her summary of how she feels about it is two words long: "I'm excited."
What it will sound like has been on record for nearly a decade. Brink told Metal Hammer in December 2017 that she was "thinking, for the first time, of doing a solo album" and had started "to slowly write", and that the result would be "more of the obscure, intimate, quiet side of me". The instrumentation follows from that: minimal, built on tribal drums, with no distorted guitars anywhere. Her image of the live show has stayed remarkably fixed across those nine years — "just me and a piano and one dress and candles all over the whole stage".
For a performer whose band's entire visual grammar is built on scale — costume changes, staging, an army of dancers — stripping it to a piano and candles is close to a complete inversion. She does not appear to find that daunting. "It doesn't frighten me, it sounds amazing. I love change," she said.
There is an older COVEN, incidentally: the Chicago occult rock group who put out "Witchcraft Destroys Minds & Reaps Souls" in 1969 and got there well ahead of nearly everyone. Given that Brink has just finished an album called "Witch", the overlap reads as deliberate rather than accidental.
That ninth IN THIS MOMENT album arrived in late August via Better Noise Music, with guest turns from Rory Rodriguez of DAYSEEKER, Kim Dracula and Kat Von D. No release date has been attached to COVEN yet — only its position in the queue, which is next.