Four months on from her first night fronting one of melodic death metal’s biggest bands, Lauren Hart is still describing it like something that happened to someone else.
Speaking to Germany’s Metal Hammer, the Arch Enemy vocalist looked back at her debut with the group — March 27, 2026, at Dongsan Live in Beijing, the opening night of a seven-date Chinese run. She said (as transcribed by Blabbermouth):
“It was a dream come true for me and the start of a new future. And it somehow connected with the child in me that loved Arch Enemy from [2001’s] Wages Of Sin [album]. And it was just all that going on in my mind and yet none of it as well because I was so in the moment. And it was so overwhelming, and the crowd response was amazing. I was on another planet. I was so happy.”
The band leaned into the occasion that night. The 19-song set opened with “Yesterday Is Dead And Gone“, a track they had not played live since 2016, and dug up “Bury Me An Angel” from 1996’s Black Earth and “Silverwing” from 1999’s Burning Bridges, neither aired since 2015. “To The Last Breath“, the single that introduced Hart, got its live debut. From the stage she told the crowd they were “making f**king history together.”
The reception she didn’t expect
Replacing a frontwoman is a thankless job in metal, and Hart went in braced for a fight. What she got instead caught her off guard:
“I received a lot of love from everyone, and I was really taken aback by that. I think in my mind I thought it would take a while to really… I thought I’d have to really work and earn that, as it’s really difficult when changes are made. But I feel like the reception immediately right away was so positive and everyone was so welcoming and wam in the audience. And I was very happy — very happy, and a little surprised, actually. It was instantly amazing.”
How she found the band in the first place
There is a neat circularity to Hart now holding the microphone. The album she named, Wages Of Sin, was Angela Gossow‘s Arch Enemy debut, and hearing it rewired what a teenage Hart thought was possible.
Asked about the first time she encountered the band, she recalled:
“It was when Wages Of Sin came out. I was hanging around my usual group of friends who were showing me metal and all that, and they were all guitar players. And when they put on the CD, I’m, like, ‘God, he sounds… That singer, he sounds great.’ [And they told me], ‘That’s not a guy. That’s a girl.’ … I had no idea women could scream — no idea at that time. And they had a band at the time, and they were just jamming their stuff, and I would beg them to let me try. And that’s eventually how I started screaming.”
Gossow fronted Arch Enemy from 2000 until 2014, when she stepped aside for Alissa White-Gluz and moved into management. She still handles the band’s business affairs.
A single built to answer the question
Founder and guitarist Michael Amott explained why the band put out “To The Last Breath” in February rather than simply announcing a new singer and waiting:
“I think one thing that was key there was to have a new song that you can just show people, ‘This is what we’re gonna do. We’re not doing this anymore, but we’re doing this, and it sounds like this. It looks like that.’ And I think it was important to have a song that was very aggressive and melodic and very good. It needed to be very good.”
The song came together fast — and remotely. As Amott put it:
“I had been working on some material previously, so I kind of reached into my catalog of songs that we haven’t released and then we fine-tuned this one into what it is now, what it became. Everything happened so fast that we didn’t have time to record… Lauren did her vocals back home, basically, in the States. So she sent her first material, the vocal tracks, and they sounded very amazing. So that was the point where I was, like, ‘Okay, this could work.’ So we hadn’t even met in person. We had only done Zoom calls before that.”
No album, at least not yet
Asked when more music is coming, Amott described a working method the band has never used before:
“We’ve always been a band that we tour and then we go away and we write a new album, and we slowly put everything together. Then we’re in the studio, and then we announce a new single and that we have a whole album. Right now we don’t have a whole album recorded, so it’s a unique situation for us. We’re working on more new stuff as well. We had a two-month break now, so we managed to work on a few things. So there’s something new coming, but I think we’re gonna release that after the summer. And then we’re going back to the studio again when we have time off. So we’re doing it in these sessions… We’re not doing a full album, but it’s all gonna become an album at some point. ‘Cause now we’re enjoying being on the road.”
Where things stand
Arch Enemy opened their summer 2026 European tour on Friday, July 17 at the Area 53 festival in Leoben, Austria — the first time Hart has fronted the band on European soil. A North American co-headline run with The Black Dahlia Murder follows, with Septicflesh, Crypta and Thrown Into Exile opening.
White-Gluz, who left in November 2025 after 11 years, has since landed on her feet: in May she was unveiled as DragonForce‘s newest member and first frontwoman.
Arch Enemy in 2026:
- Lauren Hart – vocals
- Michael Amott – guitars
- Joey Concepcion – guitars
- Sharlee D’Angelo – bass
- Daniel Erlandsson – drums
