Evanescence has released a remastered “Like You”, the song Amy Lee wrote on her own about the death of her younger sister, as the latest preview of the band’s anniversary reissue of The Open Door. It is the most exposed recording on that album, built on piano, voice and little else, and until this summer’s arena tour the band had never played it live.

The choice says something about how Evanescence wants the record remembered. The previous preview, a remastered “Sweet Sacrifice”, is the album at its most ferocious, a Grammy-nominated hard rock track that has found a second life on TikTok with listeners too young to remember its first run. “Like You” sits at the other extreme. It belongs with “Hello”, the song Lee wrote for the same sister on Fallen, and its lyric offers no consolation: the narrator wants to be where her sister is.

That bareness was the point of The Open Door. After Fallen won two Grammy Awards and turned the band into one of the biggest rock acts of its decade, Lee took greater creative control and pulled the sound toward orchestration, choirs, electronics and piano pieces. The gamble paid: the album opened at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 with more than 447,000 copies sold in its first week, nearly half a million records in seven days, and reached the Top 5 in more than 15 countries.

A song this quiet is hard to put in front of an arena crowd, which may explain the long wait. When “Like You” finally entered the setlist on the opening night of the band’s North American tour, it sat between “Lithium” and a run of new songs from Sanctuary, the sixth studio album released earlier this year. Kerrang! wrote that the performance was “exquisitely beautiful” and created “the kind of intimacy some might consider impossible in a space of this size.”

The reissue itself is thinner than the anniversary framing suggests. Beyond the 13 remastered album tracks, it adds four recordings, and three of them are rarities from the same era that fans have known for years. The only previously unreleased piece is an early demo of “Good Enough”. A remaster also cannot change what made “Like You” matter: the arrangement and Lee’s vocal stay as they were, so for anyone who already owns the album the difference is a question of mastering, not of content. For listeners waiting on Sanctuary’s next chapter, a catalogue single is a holding pattern.

The Open Door (20th Anniversary Deluxe Edition) arrives on November 6 through Craft Recordings on 2-LP, CD and digital formats, with the bonus material on Side D of the vinyl and limited colour pressings split between the band’s store, US retailers and select international shops. The original album came out on September 25, 2006. The remastered “Like You” is already streaming worldwide, and the band plays Sick New World in Fort Worth on October 24 and Red Rocks Amphitheatre on October 26, with Asia and then Australia and New Zealand next on its announced itinerary.

For two decades “Like You” lived only on the record. Now it is the song Evanescence chose to sell that record again.

Tags: alternative rock, Evanescence, gothic rock, Amy Lee, Like You (Remastered 2026), The Open Door

Evanescence remasters ‘Like You’, the grief song it kept off stage for two decades

More Like This

Ellie Goulding: ‘Like A Saviour’. Watch the Video

U2 Songs of Surrender 40 Songs Re-Recorded and Reimagined Out 17th March 2023

Nick Lachey, the 98 Degrees singer who re-recorded his hits to take his voice back

Demi Lovato Releases New Album, ‘Revamped’ Featuring Rock Versions Of Hit Songs | See Her Great Performance at The MTV VMAs if You Haven’t Seen It Yet!

Madonna Confessions II: why the unanimous critical praise demands an explanation

Discussion