The Pretty Reckless Spent Five Years Away. 'Dear God' Comes Back Loud.

The Pretty Reckless put out their fifth album, Dear God, on June 26 through Fearless Records. It is their first full-length in five years, produced by Jonathan Wyman with singer Taylor Momsen and guitarist Ben Phillips, and it lands as a 14-track, roughly 50-minute swing for the fences.

The last time this band made a record, they were grieving. Death by Rock and Roll (2021) came out of a brutal stretch: Chris Cornell, Momsen's friend and mentor, died in 2017, and the band's longtime producer Kato Khandwala died in a motorcycle accident the next year. Momsen has talked openly about the depression and substance issues that followed. That album was a wake and a slow climb out of one. Dear God is what comes after the climb. It is not about mourning anymore. It is about having survived and trying to figure out what you do with that.

The shape of it

The first thing you notice is the framing. Dear God is built around a three-part suite called "Life Evermore," and the band sequences it out of order on purpose. Part 2 opens the record. Part 3 lands in the middle, at track seven. Part 1 closes it out. Each piece is under a minute, more connective tissue than song, and the effect is a loop: the album ends where, numerically, it should have started. For a record wrestling with mortality and what survives a person, that is a tidy structural idea, and it is the kind of move a band makes when it wants you to sit with the whole thing rather than cherry-pick singles.

The singles, though, are where you hear what the band actually sounds like in 2026. "When I Wake Up," the lead, is the meanest thing here. It rides a punk tempo with the blues-rock low end the band has always leaned on, and Momsen sings it like someone watching the crash coming and refusing to brake. She described it as "the story of a dream becoming a nightmare," a life of excess on "a rollercoaster that is doomed to crash." It was the most-added song at rock radio the week it dropped, which tells you the hooks still connect even when the subject is self-sabotage. "For I Am Death," the 2025 single that kicks off the album proper, is slower and heavier, more sermon than sprint, and it sets the stakes the rest of the record plays against.

The take

When Dear God works, it works because Momsen sells it. Her voice has always been the band's whole engine, that smoke-and-gravel belt that can go from a whisper to a wall, and producer Wyman mostly gets out of its way. The title track stretches past six minutes and earns the runtime, building instead of just sitting there. "Dark Days" near the end is the other long one, and it is where the survival theme finally pays off without flinching.

The weak third act is real, though. Fourteen tracks is too many. By the back stretch the album starts repeating its own gestures, reaching for the same rock-and-roll-redemption imagery a few too many times, and a tighter ten-song version of this record would have hit harder. Early reviews have landed in roughly the same place, calling it some of the band's strongest work while flagging the bloat and the occasional lyrical cliche. That is a fair read. This is a confident, well-made rock record from a band that has nothing left to prove and, at points, a little less to say than it thinks.

Still. The Pretty Reckless came back from a record about death with one about living through it, and they did it without softening the sound that got them here. Five years away and they did not come back smaller. They came back loud.