Work Hard, Play Hard… Bitch.

Avril Lavigne has been giving a few clues about her new album, due in November (found these stories via here and here). From this story:

"It's a lot different from anything I've done before. It's not a pop rock record. This is more about emotion and feeling."

Which I'm hoping doesn't mean a succession of ballads... This quote, from here, seems to imply that that might not be the case:

Deryck Whibley, who has used the couple’s home studio to produce eight of the nine tracks she’s recorded so far. “I think this is taking the spirit of what she’s done on previous records so much further,” he says. “It’s way more meaningful, has more of an impact, more emotional. It makes me feel something more than the other stuff. And I wanted to match that musically with the track.”

Which I like the sound of, especially combined with this from Avril:

“[Best Damn Thing] was intended to be fun, to be rockin’,” she explains. “All I had in my mind was my live show, running around on stage, getting the crowd involved. This record, I just really, really wanted to sing. We started recording each song, some of them, just with acoustic guitar and the vocal and building it from there. It’s stripped down. I love performing that way, so I really felt like it was time to make a record like that. To just make it all about the vocal and the performance, and the vibe, and the emotion.”

While I don't mind The Best Damn Thing, it definitely lacks the depth of the first two albums, so if the new record is going to build on the first two, it certainly sounds like a positive thing. The 3rd album, which it might have been thought would see the sound mature, seemed very much a regression, more teenage than what she was doing as an actual teenager, so hopefully the new album will rectify that and The Best Damn Thing will go down as an anomaly in her catalogue.
She is also using some old songs for the album:

a love song Lavigne wrote when she was 15: “I always really liked this song,” she says, “and I never recorded it.” There are other songs from her past on the record, too, including one she wrote at 17, and one she wrote at 20. “I always had material, but some people that I worked with didn’t really care, because they wanted to write the stuff,” she says, when asked why the tunes haven’t surfaced before. “Some people were just like, ‘Ah, whatever. You’re a little girl. What do you know?’ I know how this works. It’s my fourth record. It’s not rocket science. I think people doubted me before, and I’m finally just like, ‘I’m doing this.’”

Which on the one hand could be considered a regression, or even laziness, but on the other hand, given how much I liked the first two albums, and the lyrical content of the first two albums, I am at least willing to give the benefit of the doubt. It will certainly be interesting - a mature album that harks back to songs she wrote in her teens. And given what I have previously wrote about Avril Lavigne I find this quote revealing, especially as regards the third album:

“I was always really honest in my lyrics,” she says, “I think more so when I was younger, and now it’s kind of come back to that. Just like, you know what? I’m not trying to write a perfect pop song. I’m just trying to write a song that’s honest right now, even if something sounds weird or a lyric might not make sense to someone.

In summary - looking forward to the new album, which after The Best Damn Thing, I maybe didn't think I would be. Which isn't to say it's a bad album, but continuing down the road it created may well have resulted in one...