Devil May Cry will soon be shoot ‘n’ slashing its way onto Netflix, and based on every little slice we’ve seen, it will be a banger. The opening credits feature Limp Bizkit’s Rollin’, while the trailer blasts out Papa Roach’s Last Resort. Given that the first few Devil May Cry games launched in the ‘00s, the series is gearing up to be a stylish combo of rock powerhouses of the era. Now another ‘00s legend is joining the ranks, with Evanescence recording a brand new track for the series.
Afterlife is co-written by MAKO and Evanescence’s Amy Lee, and it slaps. I recently spoke with Lee about the track, her love for games, anime, and how we’ve come a long way since geeking over Tenchi Muyo.
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“This is the first time I’ve seen something where they’re going to that time period as a throwback,” Lee tells me. “It feels really good.” Not all of the music in the series is about that ’00s nostalgia, however. Aside from Afterlife, which is a brand new track, Lee says there is a “bunch of really great old and new music”.
On Writing Afterlife With Mako
“Mako started the song, and we finished it together. I can’t take credit for having an idea to start the thing that lit the match, but [I] definitely took it and ran with it. Right away, I was like, ‘Oh, I really like the vibe of this. Let’s check out the show.’”
Lee watched the whole first season before it was finalised to help get some inspiration for Afterlife. “I love it. It’s so well done. It’s beautiful to look at,” she says, before quickly adding with a laugh, “I mean, it’s gruesome, it’s not for children. But when I say it’s well done, I mean the story and it’s layered and you’re like, ‘Oh, shit!’ You’re definitely on a trip constantly.”
Watching the show helped Lee when writing some of the lyrics for Afterlife. “Whenever I’m involved in anything like this, I feel like it’s really important to get in there. See what you’re doing, even if you’re not writing the whole thing.” She says writing songs for a show like this, where you know what happens, means that she tries to avoid “too many specifics” when it comes to the lyrics.
“You want to get the heart and the emotion and draw all of those things from yourself and project it from the character through you. I think for me, subconsciously, naturally, lyrics and vibes come out and come through that I don’t even really necessarily mean to, because I’m just living in that place after watching the whole thing, you know?”
Lee says she likes writing for film, TV, and other projects that aren’t her usual because “there’s always something to learn”, emphasisng that she loves collaboration and realising she’s making something she wouldn’t have chosen to do without someone else’s input.
“I gravitate towards the same modes because that’s just what my voice does when I open my mouth. Some kind of collaboration is great for that, because then they would have gone this way and I’m like ‘What if I go that way?’ It just becomes something where you end up pushing yourself into new places that sometimes you end up like liking even better.
“When you’re writing for something visual like this, it’s great because you have so many clues, there’s an intention. There’s a map in place for where you’re headed and where you want to go and what feelings in particular you want to feel. So there’s tempo and mood and substance. All those things are there for you and you get to interpret that.”
Hey! Listen!
Lee is a gamer, though she admits she has never played a Devil May Cry game. “I was looking at my interviews today and I was like, damn, I failed,” she laughs. “If I’d done my job correctly, I would have at least played the game a few times before taking on gamer magazine interviews. I haven’t played the game, but I’m aware of it. I know what the imagery is. I’ve seen gameplay. I know what it is a lot more now after being involved.”
From gameplay footage, she tells me her favourite character is Lady, AKA Mary Arkham. “I naturally attach myself to Mary because that’s kind of the spirit I was putting myself into for our song, and she’s a big part of the episode that features [Afterlife]. That’s the one I feel like I can relate to the easiest.”
While she doesn’t have DmC experience, Lee is a big fan of The Legend of Zelda. “That’s been my life’s game. It’s got incredible music.” Though she was just on Super Mario back in the cartridge era, when The Ocarina of Time launched for the Nintendo 64, she and her siblings were obsessed.
“It was the coolest. It was the first role-playing type game where you could choose where to go next and what quest to follow. It would all of a sudden start raining or become night. It was just, like, a world. It’s funny because we’ll go back and play Ocarina of Time now and it’s all pixelated and stuff. In my mind, it’s beautiful. I don’t even remember it like that anymore.
“All those games were great. Majora’s Mask, awesome. But then after all those years, when Breath of the Wild came out and Tears of the Kingdom after that, I can’t tell you how happy I was. It’s so beautiful. It’s like everything I loved about the original that is in full swing, like a hundred times bigger and more beautiful and so much to do. I play Tears of the Kingdom almost every day with my son.”
With the launch of the Nintendo Switch 2 fast approaching, Lee tells me she plans to buy one and hopes that Nintendo keeps “cleaning up the old ones” and re-releasing older games so they can be appreciated properly. “We have the old system and stuff at my parents’ house and we’ll whip it out sometimes for fun. [But] on a new TV, it looks so bad.”
No doubt the Switch comes in particularly handy when touring, which Lee says Evanescence have been doing a lot of. Their last album, The Bitter Truth, debuted in 2020, but due to the pandemic, they didn’t start touring for it until 2021.
“We’re very excited to release something new,” she says, telling me they’ve been working on lots of new music. “I want to write. I need to create. I can’t do the same set list again. Let’s go! We’re just in there just going for it. I’ve been busy, but it feels really good to be busy right now.”
I also had to ask Lee which video game she would pair her band’s most iconic song, Bring Me to Life, with if she could. “Resident Evil,” she says before laughing, “That’s too scary, I was trying to think zombies. You know, Bring Me to Life, dead.”
A Love For Anime
Lee is also a self-confessed anime fan, saying part of the reason she loves anime is because she loves art. “When I get stuck writing music, I love to paint and create things. That’s always been my go-to other thing. I’ve always loved animation in general because it’s art. It’s moving art and anything is possible. You have to think about special effects or making something look real. If you can imagine it, then it can happen.”
She also tells me she’s a big fan of Miyazaki’s work, though she recalls there was a time when people would ask ‘what’s that?’ when she talked about Studio Ghibli. I admit I can also remember having to explain to people ‘it’s like the Japanese equivalent of Disney’, and even though the critically acclaimed Spirited Away launched in the early noughties, I remember it having only a small display in our local Blockbuster, and few people I knew had even heard of it, never mind watched it.
“There used to be a lot of little fun teenagery shows that I watched back in high school. Inuyasha and stuff,” Lee says. I rattle off some of my own high school anime faves including Tenchi Muyo, and it’s like I just reminded her of a blast from the past. “Tenchi! I love it. That was like my guilty pleasure that I couldn’t really tell anybody about. I owned like a bunch of Tenchi.”
Anime has grown so much more popular in the West since the ‘80s and ‘90s, and gone are the days when you’d be called a nerd for racing home to watch an anime on Cartoon Network. It’s now a fundamental part of mainstream culture, and that’s part of why we’re now spoiled for choice for new animated series, video game adaptations, and everything else our little geeky hearts desire. Anime and games are cool now, go back and tell your younger self it’s ok, we get there eventually.
Though Lee can’t say much about the narrative of Devil May Cry, she left me with one hint that “Everything is not as it seems. That’s one of the things I really, really enjoyed about the show.” Devil May Cry launches on April 3, 2025, and is created by Adi Shankar, the producer behind Netflix’s Castlevania and Castlevania: Nocturne. If what we’ve seen of the soundtrack so far is anything to go by, Devil May Cry is going to be packed full of tunes, style, and action, and my body is ready.
