Courtney Love said in an Instagram video posted August 14 that her long-delayed next solo album is finished. "It's done. It's kind of been done. It's a really good record. I put a lot into it," she told fans, though she gave no title or release date and said she is still figuring out how to roll it out.
In the same video she described a 2019 health scare in detail for the first time. She said she had moved to England that year when her body "just exploded," leading to frequent hospital stays. "I almost died. I lost all my hair. I was about 100 pounds," she said, adding that doctors told her she was dying and that she refused to believe them.
Love tied the ordeal to a childhood habit she called "pattern interrupt," recalling adults insisting red was blue until she began doubting her own senses, and said the memory shaped the new record's themes. That same stubbornness carried her through the diagnosis, she said: "Somehow I got better. I'm healthy, which is amazing."
The album would be Love's first release since 2010's Nobody's Daughter, though that record was billed as a Hole album even though Love was the only band member involved in it; her only release under her own name remains 2004's America's Sweetheart. Among the collaborators she named in the video's caption are Michael Stipe of R.E.M. and Green Day's Billie Joe Armstrong, along with Echo and the Bunnymen guitarist Will Sergeant and her former Hole bandmate Melissa Auf der Maur.
The long buildup follows a rough reception for Nobody's Daughter, which Love said "flopped," recalling a gig "playing a place called Pizza Hut Park while Limp Bizkit was headlining with Thirty Seconds to Mars." She has stayed visible since then even without new music, including as the subject of the documentary Antiheroine, which premiered at Sundance in January, and that LP arrives after a year of Hole-adjacent news for Love, who ruled out a full reunion this year but said she and Auf der Maur would tour together playing some new songs instead.
Love did not set a release date, so the album is not yet on the release calendar, and it is unclear when she will tour behind it. The update lands in a busy month of rock news, capping off a year in which she has stayed in headlines through the documentary, the Hole speculation and now the finished record itself.
The facts
- Says her next solo album is finished, calling it "a really good record"
- Would be her first release since 2010's Nobody's Daughter, billed then as a Hole album
- Describes a 2019 illness in England she says nearly killed her and cost her her hair
- Says doctors told her she was going to die; she says she recovered fully
- Named album collaborators include Michael Stipe, Billie Joe Armstrong, Will Sergeant and Melissa Auf der Maur
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