This November will mark the ten year anniversary of In This Moment's fifth studio album, Black Widow. The record, generally seen as a positive move in an encouraging new direction for the band, was given a very solid 7/10 score by Metal Hammer's Stephen Hill upon release, with Hill remarking: "It’s slicker and poppier than before – no doubt this is the band’s most commercial record yet – but it suits them. There’s nothing here that will reinvent the wheel for rock music; what there is instead is a bunch of highly polished and beautifully produced, commercially savvy anthems for people who like their music to be as big, bold and brash as the image that In This Moment project."
The album became the band's most successful to date, landing at a hugely impressive number eight on the Billboard 200 and producing two certified Gold singles in the States in the form of Sick Like Me and Big Bad Wolf. It was also a vital album for In This Moment's talismanic frontwoman Maria Brink, who used the writing process for the record to explore different sides of herself and starting to embrace elements of her personality that she had attempted to cast aside previously.
"I think Black Widow comes from me kind of learning to embrace the darker sides of me," she told Metal Hammer at the time. "I used to kind of hide or be ashamed of the eccentric sides of myself. Just all kinds of things in me that I thought were flaws in myself and a lot of disorders that I have and mental things that make me kind of quirky and OCD and all these things that I used to be embarrassed about...I've kind of learned to embrace the sides of me that I used to consider darker sides of myself and kind of [am] learning the beauty in those."
With Black Widow, Brink was able to creatively channel that journey of self discovery into something that, she said, gave her more agency.
"Black Widow is kind of about embracing those things," she noted. "Embracing who I am, what I come from and stepping forward and taking it into a very powerful place where I'm in control instead of out of control. I'm embracing those different colours and those different sides of myself. And I think that that's what Black Widow kind of symbolises: me moving forward and upward and being confident within that."
Watch a video of Maria Brink discussing Black Widow below.
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