Three years ago Ronnie Atkins said the band hadn’t spoken since 2019 and that time was not on their side. Frontiers Music have now confirmed a new record.
Pretty Maids are making a new album. Frontiers Music Srl confirmed the band are at work on it, with release set for 2027.
It will be their first studio record since Undress Your Madness, released in November 2019, and will be produced by Danish producer Jacob Hansen, whose credits take in Amaranthe, Volbeat, Epica, Primal Fear and Evergrey. Further details are expected in the coming months.
The band’s current lineup is Ronnie Atkins on vocals, Ken Hammer on lead guitar, Rene Shades on bass, Chris Laney on rhythm guitar and keyboards and Allan Tschicaja on drums.
This outcome looked unlikely for a long time, including to the singer.
Atkins was diagnosed with lung cancer in October 2019, weeks before Undress Your Madness came out, and the band never toured behind it. The pandemic followed. By December 2022 he was describing a group that had not been in a room together since 2019, with unresolved issues between them and nothing planned, and said time was not on their side.
A year later the position had softened, but only slightly. Speaking to Jorge Botas of Portugal’s Metal Global in December 2023, Atkins set out modest ambitions.
“Yeah, well, we were planning on a few selected Pretty Maids shows. It’s not gonna be a hell of a lot, I think. We’re gonna do maybe five, six festivals during the summer or something,” he said at the time:
He explained what the shows were for: “I know there’s a lot of fans out there that wanna see the band again, at least to make some kind of closure. It all ended in a wrong way because I got sick, and while I was sick, I couldn’t do s**t for six months. And in that time, we released a new album. We never had the chance to tour with it. Then came the lockdown. So we just wanna go out and play a couple of shows. How much it’s gonna be, I don’t know. I don’t know how much more we’re gonna do. We might continue. I don’t know. It all depends a little bit on my health as well.”
Pretty Maids played their first show in nearly five years on June 16, 2024 at Forbrændingen in Albertslund, Denmark, billed as Kingmakers for a warm-up that was not publicly announced. Their official return came four days later at Copenhell in Copenhagen.
Atkins made his diagnosis public in an open letter in October 2019, after surgery and a subsequent bout of pneumonia. He completed 33 radiation treatments and four rounds of chemotherapy that autumn, and in February 2020 announced that scans showed no remaining signs of cancer.
The disease returned in October 2020. The following spring, after further pain and another scan, he was told it had spread and was diagnosed with stage 4 cancer, which he has described publicly as incurable. He has lived with it since, working between regular scans, and has continued to release music throughout, the solo albums One Shot in 2021 and Make It Count in 2022, followed by the Symphomaniac EP.
Atkins and Hammer formed Pretty Maids in Denmark in 1982, and the partnership has been the constant through every version of the band since. Their catalogue includes Future World, Jump The Gun, Pandemonium, Motherland and Kingmaker, built on melodic hard rock with keyboards and large choruses.
Future World, their second full-length, remains the record most closely associated with them. Released by CBS in 1987, it had sold 300,000 copies worldwide by 1990 and reached No. 165 on the Billboard 200.
Its production history was less orderly than its reputation suggests. Eddie Kramer was hired to produce and was reportedly dismissed during the sessions, with engineer Chris Isca finishing the record and taking a co-production credit. The mixing was split between Flemming Rasmussen, known for his work with Metallica, Rainbow and Morbid Angel, and Kevin Elson, who had produced multi-platinum records for Journey, Mr. Big and Europe.
