Jenna_McDougall_interview_2017

Tonight Alive's Jenna McDougall opens up about mental health and body image

AP correspondent, Australia, Mike Hohnen sat down with Tonight Alive's Jenna McDougall to talk about it all: from mental health and image, to spirituality and the band's upcoming album. 

Tonight Alive's Underworld, one of AP's Most Anticipated alternative albums of 2018, is out Jan. 12 on Hopeless Records. “We wrote it in three months, so the songs are really a family,” McDougall says. “They weren’t written over two years—they’re from a very condensed period of time, and they’re all relative to one another. They’re from the same journey. They all have crossovers in the topics and emotions that are involved.”

“We decided that we wanted to revisit all of the things that made us fall in love with music in the first place.” 

Read more: 20 musicians who make us want to dye our hair

In her interview with Hohnen, McDougall opened up about why she shaved her head last year, how important is it for her to gain the trust of her fans and so much more. 

“Someone said to me the other day that the more polished our sound became over our career, the less polished my image was, which was really cool because I became more angry and more fierce and more empowered in a way.”

On mental health, McDougall gave the following advice: “Lighten the world a little bit and not feel so burdened and so heavy because of it,” she says. “That helps me to see through it a bit more. See through the illusion, see through theater of it all because I’m just playing a role. I’m just a projection of what I think I am and what other people think I am.”

Watch AP's five-part series, Jenna McDougall's Guide To Life, below: