It's been a rough past few years for Avril Lavigne, but she's finally ready to make her comeback.
The 33-year-old Canadian singer-songwriter, who became an early '00s music icon with hits such as "Complicated" and "Sk8ter Boi," revealed in 2015 that she had been diagnosed with Lyme disease. In December 2016, she announced she is working on a new album, her first since her 2013 self-titled fifth major studio record.
Lavigne walked her first red carpet (technically orange) in two years on Friday, attending the 25th annual Race To Erase MS Gala at the Beverly Hilton Hotel. She talked to E! News' Sibley Scoles about her new music, saying her album is set to be completed next month and will be released later this year.
"It's a really powerful record," she said. "I've been working on this for three years. I can actually say this time I'm going to be done with this album in two weeks and I will put it out this year."
"I've been writing songs that are really just powerful and true and honest and sincere and I think people will really be able to relate to it," she said. "I've gone through a lot of personal stuff in the past two years and so I've really drawn from that. I mean, I always do but this album is so different...I am producing, too, the songs. It's more of a vocal record and just like, hearing the lyrics and really hearing the emotion in the vocal. It's very piano-driven, too."
For the past couple of months, Lavigne has been posting on Instagram photos of herself in a recording studio.
"I know my fans have been like waiting for a long time and some of them are unhappy. They're like, 'OK, what is going on with this album?'" she said. "But trust me, I'm doing everything I can and I just want it to be ready and everything to be perfect and lot of like, care has gone into this. All the waiting and the hard work on my end will pay off, I promise."