Yesterday, Courtney Love posted an Instagram video offering some updates on her years-in-the-making next record, which will mark her first new work since Hole’s 2010 LP Nobody’s Daughter. In the clip, Love confirmed that the album is “done,” but revealed some startling context to the long germination time—a mystery 2019 illness that almost killed her.
”I went to England in 2019, and when I went there, my body just exploded,” Love recalled in the clip. “I lost all my hair. I was about 100 pounds. And they told me I was going to die. I didn’t believe them.”
According to Love, her refusal to accept how serious her diagnosis was at the time reflected a childhood habit of “pattern interrupt[ing] the adults,” memories she said influenced her new album. “They’d say red was blue, and then I’d see blue. But blue was blue. So I’d gaslight myself that maybe they were right, and red was blue…and my head would explode.”
“I never really lost my ability to see that fucking red was red, despite them telling me that red was blue,“ she continued. “And so when they said I was going to die, I just didn’t believe them. And somehow I got better. I’m healthy, which is amazing.”
On the album front, Love also thanked a number of collaborators, including Green Day’s Billie Joe Armstrong, Echo and the Bunnymen’s Will Sargent, and R.E.M.’s Michael Stipe. “When I made it, i believed this was my last record so I made the record I always wanted to make,” she wrote. Although she didn’t share an official release date or title, she did hint at plans to tour the album, saying: “I want to tour more than anything, and I want to sing. That’s what keeps my soul and body happy.”
Although new music from Love has been scant over the past decade, she has continued to roll out a variety of artistic projects, from her series of Geese covers to her central role in the documentary Antiheroine, which premiered at Sundance in January. “Thank you for giving me the grace I need to prepare how to enter the world again,” her post concluded.
Revisit Quinn Moreland’s Sunday Review of Hole’s Celebrity Skin.