Verdict in brief
The Dead Daisies do not make albums to surprise people. They make albums that sound like the bands David Lowy grew up loving, played by people who used to be in those bands. Light 'Em Up, released on 6 September 2024 on SPV / Steamhammer in Europe and Ward Records in Japan, takes that brief and strips it back further than it has been stripped in a decade. There are ten tracks, almost all under four minutes, no orchestral swells, no Glenn Hughes vocal pyrotechnics, no Mediterranean studio. Just John Corabi back at the microphone, Doug Aldrich playing the kind of leads he played on Coverdale records, and producer Marti Frederiksen pushing the whole thing through Nashville with a tape-warm, mid-range-forward mix.
The result will not convert anyone who never wanted a Lowy-led supergroup in the first place. For anyone who lived in Make Some Noise in 2016 and Burn It Down in 2018, it is the most fun the band have sounded since Corabi last left.
The Dead Daisies before Light 'Em Up
The Dead Daisies are now thirteen years deep, and most casual fans have lost count of the lineups. Founded in Sydney in 2012 by Australian guitarist and businessman David Lowy with vocalist Jon Stevens, the band's identity has always been the revolving door rather than the songbook. Members on past records include Slash, Frank Ferrer and Richard Fortus of Guns N' Roses, Dizzy Reed, Marco Mendoza of Thin Lizzy and [Whitesnake](/posts/the-making-of-whitesnake-by-whitesnake/), John Tempesta of The Cult, Deen Castronovo of Journey, and the Bernard Fowler of Rolling Stones touring fame.
By the time the band reached Holy Ground in 2021, the line-up was Lowy, Aldrich, drummer Tommy Clufetos and a new frontman who also handled bass, Glenn Hughes. Hughes brought voice, history and Black Country Communion-shaped chops, and the next two records, Holy Ground and 2022's Radiance, leaned heavier and soulier than anything else in the catalogue. Critics were respectful. The longer-serving fanbase, which had cut its teeth on Corabi-era straight-eight rockers like Long Way to Go and Rise Up, was less unanimous.
When Hughes returned to Deep Purple and Black Country Communion duties in 2023, Lowy did what he always does. He picked up the phone.
That phone call has been, for more than a decade, the band's actual creative engine. Lowy himself is the rare constant in a project that has otherwise treated band membership as a rolling commission. The structural advantage of that approach is that the band can absorb personnel change without losing momentum. The structural disadvantage is that the sound has never quite cohered into a single identity, which is why the Daisies catalogue reads less as a discography and more as a set of one-album collaborations. Light 'Em Up is the first record in years to attempt to reverse that perception, by deliberately recreating the conditions of an earlier album that the audience had already accepted.
Why John Corabi came back
John Corabi's relationship with The Dead Daisies has always been the most fully realised in the catalogue, three studio albums plus a live record between 2015 and 2019, a tenure longer than the one he served as Motley Crue's frontman in the mid-90s. When the partnership ended in early 2019 it was amicable, but it left a hole the Hughes era never quite filled for the most committed slice of the audience.
Speaking to Metal Talk in August 2023, Corabi was candid about how the reunion came about. He had quietly helped the band prep for a tour with Hughes when Hughes was unwell, and the conversation with Lowy that followed in Nashville in April or May 2023 was straightforward. Hughes was returning to Deep Purple work and Black Country Communion. Lowy asked, in Corabi's words, "if I was rested" and whether he wanted to "keep this train moving". Corabi said yes. The official announcement came on 19 May 2023, alongside news that former Whitesnake bassist Michael Devin had joined for the first time.
A Best Of album followed in August 2023 and the Resurrected Tour took the new lineup through Canada, the US, Japan and Europe across the back end of the year. Studio work for the album that would become Light 'Em Up began in March 2024, and within weeks Tommy Clufetos was back behind the drums in place of the departed touring drummer. The lineup that recorded the record was set.
The Best Of compilation served a more practical function than a typical retrospective. It allowed the Corabi-led touring band to play the Burn It Down and Make Some Noise catalogue alongside selected Hughes-era cuts in front of an audience that had not seen this combination of musicians before. Two previously unreleased tracks were also included, written and recorded with the new lineup, as a soft launch for the studio chemistry that would shortly produce Light 'Em Up. By the time the band entered Nashville in March 2024 they had already played a long tour cycle together and the on-tape interplay benefits from that road time. It is one of the small but audible things that separates this album from a typical reunion record.
Marti Frederiksen takes the chair
The producer choice is the most important context for the way the album sounds. Marti Frederiksen, a Nashville-based songwriter and producer, last worked with The Dead Daisies on Make Some Noise in 2016, which is still the record this album most resembles. His CV runs through Aerosmith's Just Push Play and Honkin' on Bobo, Motley Crue's New Tattoo, Buckcherry's most enduring material, Gavin Rossdale and Daughtry. Frederiksen does not make records that sound like 2024. He makes records that sound like rock radio in roughly 1997, with mid-range guitars set front and centre, drums dry and close, and vocals that sit on top rather than tucked inside the wash.
For an album whose entire commercial proposition is that John Corabi is back and the band have stopped chasing prog, that is exactly the right choice. Where Ben Grosse's mix on the Hughes records favoured air and depth, Frederiksen brings everything forward. Aldrich's amps are recognisably his amps. Devin's bass is pick-aggressive and audible. Clufetos's snare cracks. Nothing is hidden, nothing is gilded.
Frederiksen also has long-standing songwriting credits with Corabi, and the chemistry between the two is the other reason the writing on this record sits where it does. Corabi has frequently spoken in interviews about how comfortable the Nashville sessions tend to be, partly because the producer is also a writer and partly because Frederiksen's house style allows the singer's lower register to carry the song rather than asking him to chase a register he no longer reaches as easily. The decision to ground the album in Nashville also avoided the European recording-residency model that produced the Hughes records, with the practical effect of keeping the sessions shorter, the budgets tighter and the playing more first-take. Whether by design or by Frederiksen's habit, the album sounds like a band playing together in a room rather than a project assembled in layers.
The lineup on record
Five names on the cover, all of them with a CV that justifies the supergroup tag.
- John Corabi, lead vocals, formerly of Motley Crue, The Scream and Union.
- Doug Aldrich, lead guitar, formerly of Whitesnake, Dio, Burning Rain and Revolution Saints.
- David Lowy, rhythm guitar, founder, also of Mink and Red Phoenix.
- Michael Devin, bass, formerly of Whitesnake.
- Tommy Clufetos, drums, formerly the touring drummer for Ozzy Osbourne, [Black Sabbath](/posts/black-sabbath-a-complete-history/) and Rob Zombie.
Three Whitesnake alumni in the same band, including Aldrich and Devin who were core members of the Forevermore-era David Coverdale lineup, gives a fair indication of where the rhythm-section feel comes from. Clufetos's resume with Ozzy Osbourne and the touring Black Sabbath does the rest.
Album facts
| Field | Detail |
|---|---|
| Artist | The Dead Daisies |
| Album | Light 'Em Up |
| Release date | 6 September 2024 |
| Label | SPV / Steamhammer (Europe), Ward Records (Japan) |
| Producer | Marti Frederiksen |
| Studio | Recorded in Nashville, Tennessee |
| Genre | Hard rock, classic rock revival |
| Track count | 10 |
| Lead single | Light 'Em Up, released 10 May 2024 |
| Additional singles | I'm Gonna Ride (2 August 2024), Love That'll Never Be (14 February 2025) |
| Position in catalogue | Seventh studio album, first with Corabi back since Burn It Down (2018) |
| Followed by | Lookin' For Trouble, a covers-led blues album released 30 May 2025 |
Personnel and credits
| Role | Player | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Core band | ||
| Lead vocals, acoustic guitar | John Corabi | Co-wrote across the album with Marti Frederiksen |
| Lead guitar, backing vocals | Doug Aldrich | Ex-Whitesnake, ex-Dio, member since 2016 |
| Rhythm guitar | David Lowy | Founder, sole continuous member since 2012 |
| Bass, backing vocals | Michael Devin | First studio appearance with the band |
| Drums | Tommy Clufetos | Returned to the kit in early 2024 |
| Production | ||
| Producer | Marti Frederiksen | Recorded the band in Nashville, also co-wrote |
| Engineering and mix | Marti Frederiksen and team | Specific engineering credits not widely published; SPV / Steamhammer release |
| Touring substitute (note) | ||
| Lead guitar, November 2024 | Reb Beach | Filled in for Aldrich on the European leg due to Aldrich's health issues; does not appear on the record |
Track 1: Light 'Em Up
The title track opens the album with no preamble, a two-bar guitar figure from Aldrich locking in with Clufetos's snare on the upbeat, and Corabi delivering the title hook before the listener has even located the volume knob. It is the most efficient single the band have cut since Make Some Noise, and Corabi's own description of it as "a kick-ass, straight-ahead rock and roll tune" is unusually accurate as press copy goes. There is no chorus trickery, no key change, no breakdown. The song does what the cover art promises and then leaves.
As a piece of album-opener craft it is also unusually disciplined. The song refuses to over-introduce itself or to telegraph the rest of the record's variety. By the time the listener realises that Light 'Em Up will not be ten variations on this template, the title track has already done its job of restating the band's identity as a hard rock band. Aldrich's solo is short, perhaps twelve bars, and it ends inside the eight-bar bridge rather than at the end of one. The decision to truncate the solo is a Frederiksen production instinct that the album returns to repeatedly: solos exist to serve the song, not the player.
Track 2: Times Are Changing
The second song slows the tempo and leans into a bluesier, semi-acoustic verse before opening up into a Whitesnake-shaped chorus. Corabi's lower register, which the Hughes-era records rarely had room to feature, is the centrepiece. Aldrich plays a clean-tone solo that recalls his Burning Rain work more than his Whitesnake stadium years, and the song is a useful early signal that this album will not be ten variants of the title track. It is also one of the only places where the band let a hook breathe past three minutes.
Lyrically the song is one of the more conventional pieces on the record, a road-tested complaint about a changing world that sits within a long lineage of mid-tempo hard rock. The execution is what lifts it. The vocal arrangement layers Corabi against Aldrich on the chorus harmonies, with Devin's bass-line moving counter to the main riff in a way that gives the song a forward momentum its tempo would not otherwise suggest. As a sequencing decision, placing it second is one of the smartest choices on the record. After the brash opening, a more deliberate track resets the listening pace before the album commits to its own rhythm.
Track 3: I Wanna Be Your Bitch
The most provocatively titled cut on the record, and predictably the one most quoted in early reviews. The song itself is less confrontational than the title implies, a swaggering mid-tempo riff with a chorus that turns on Corabi's leering delivery. The lyric is unapologetic 1980s Sunset Strip in attitude, which is either a charming retro touch or a missed opportunity to update the band's tonal range, depending on the reviewer's appetite for the form. As a piece of writing it is well constructed. As a thesis statement it tells you exactly the kind of room The Dead Daisies wanted to make a record in.
Track 4: I'm Gonna Ride
The album's most surprising song, and the second single. Where almost every other cut points at hard rock, I'm Gonna Ride tips its hat to country rock, with a galloping rhythm pattern, a touch of pedal-steel-flavoured slide from Aldrich, and a singalong chorus that would not be out of place on a late-period Bon Jovi record. It also features one of Corabi's most committed vocals on the album, the rasp dialled back, the phrasing closer to country-storyteller than rock-shouter. The video, shot on the road, doubles down on the highway imagery.
That the band placed this song as the second single rather than buried it deeper in the running order is itself a signal of confidence. Country-rock crossovers are the kind of thing that hard rock fanbases historically punish, and the Daisies' core audience is not obviously looking for Bon Jovi 2.0. The single instead trades on the song's craft, which is considerable, and on the strength of the chorus, which is one of the most singable on the album. The result is a track that opens the band's commercial possibilities without diluting the rest of the record, and that gives the live setlist a moment of contrast that the hard-rock-by-numbers Daisies tours of the late 2010s did not always have.
Track 5: Back to Zero
Five songs in, the album takes its first genuine left turn. Back to Zero uses an Alice in Chains-flavoured vocal harmony in the chorus, with Aldrich shadowing Corabi a third below for darker, grungier weight. The verses are sparse, almost half-time, before the chorus arrives with a thick, detuned riff. It is a useful reminder that Aldrich and Clufetos cut their teeth on heavier records than the Daisies usually make. The mix lets the harmony do the work, and Frederiksen wisely keeps the production from glossing it.
Track 6: Way Back Home
A road-song variation on the country-rock template established by I'm Gonna Ride, but rougher around the edges. Way Back Home is built on an acoustic-led verse, an electric chorus and a guitar solo that earns its place. The lyric is on-brand for Corabi's writing voice, a touring musician's lament about the pull of home, and the song's value sits more in its sequencing than its individual ambitions. It is the breath between the heavier songs that bookend it.
Track 7: Take a Long Line
The album's most overtly Australian moment, a punchy, bass-led rocker with a vocal phrasing that nods to David Lowy's homeland scene without ever quite quoting it. The bass tone, brittle and pick-driven, is the highest point of Devin's first appearance on a Daisies studio record, and the song closes on a vamped outro chorus that is clearly built for the live set. It is also one of the cuts that benefits most from Frederiksen's narrower, more aggressive mix, the kind of song that disappears under reverb but lands hard when produced dry.
Track 8: My Way and the Highway
If the album has a deep cut destined to become a setlist staple, it is this one. The riff is a half-time, Sabbath-shaped chug, Clufetos plays with the kind of restrained authority his Black Sabbath touring years honed, and the chorus is a one-line hook of the kind classic rock radio still rewards. Aldrich takes the most extended solo on the record and reminds the listener what a difference a properly miked Marshall cabinet makes. It is the song that most clearly justifies the supergroup billing.
Track 9: Love That'll Never Be
The ballad, released as a single on 14 February 2025 in time for the band's spring European tour. Love That'll Never Be is built around an open-tuned acoustic figure with a string-pad underbed, the chorus expanding into a full-band swell rather than a guitar solo. Corabi has always been a strong ballad singer, more interpreter than belter, and the song plays to that. The lyric is one of the album's most personal-sounding pieces of writing, the kind of song that ends a Dead Daisies live set rather than opening it. It is a noticeable softening just before the closer reverses course.
Track 10: Take My Soul
The album closes with a gospel-tinged, almost devotional rocker that uses a layered backing-vocal arrangement to lift the chorus into something genuinely uplifting. The song is the closest the record comes to the soul-rock register the Hughes era explored, and it is a clever bit of sequencing. Having spent forty minutes proving that the band can still deliver no-nonsense rock and roll, they close on the one song that quietly nods to the era they have just left behind. As an album-closer it works, and as a live encore candidate it works even better.
Tracklist at a glance
| # | Title | Single? | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Light 'Em Up | Yes, 10 May 2024 | Title track, lead single |
| 2 | Times Are Changing | Bluesier mid-tempo, low-register Corabi vocal | |
| 3 | I Wanna Be Your Bitch | Sleaze-rock swagger | |
| 4 | I'm Gonna Ride | Yes, 2 August 2024 | Country-rock departure, second single |
| 5 | Back to Zero | Grunge-shaped chorus harmony | |
| 6 | Way Back Home | Road-song acoustic-led rocker | |
| 7 | Take a Long Line | Punchy, bass-forward, built for live | |
| 8 | My Way and the Highway | Half-time Sabbath chug, longest solo on the record | |
| 9 | Love That'll Never Be | Yes, 14 February 2025 | The ballad |
| 10 | Take My Soul | Gospel-tinged closer with stacked backing vocals |
Production and sound
Frederiksen's production is the album's defining technical feature. Where the Hughes-era records were mixed for stereo width and instrumental separation, Light 'Em Up is mixed for mid-range punch. Aldrich's lead tone is left ragged rather than polished. Lowy's rhythm guitar is panned tight and given audible bite. The bass sits above the kick rather than under it. Clufetos's drums are close-miked and dry, the snare deliberately bright. Corabi's vocal is placed on top of the mix with minimal effects beyond a light plate reverb on the choruses.
The choices add up to a record that sounds like the bands the players first cut their teeth on rather than anything contemporary. There is no Pro Tools sheen here, or if there is it has been deliberately disguised. For listeners who valued the more ambitious production palette of Radiance this will read as a regression. For listeners who came to The Dead Daisies looking for a working-band record, it is the most coherent thing the project has released since 2018.
Singles and videos
The single rollout was tightly managed. Light 'Em Up arrived as the lead single on 10 May 2024, accompanied by a performance video shot in a stripped-down rehearsal-room setting that put Corabi back at the front of the frame. The decision to lead with the most representative track on the album, rather than the most adventurous, set the marketing tone for the campaign. I'm Gonna Ride followed on 2 August 2024, with a road-trip video that traded on the country-rock departure and gave the casual listener a misleading but commercially useful suggestion that the album might be a stylistic stretch.
The third single, Love That'll Never Be, was held back to 14 February 2025, neatly timed to Valentine's Day and to the band's March European tour. By that point the album cycle had already shifted into its blues-album phase, with a cover of Robert Johnson's Crossroads arriving on 28 February 2025 and a cover of John Lee Hooker's Boom Boom on 25 April 2025 as the band trailed the May 2025 covers album, Lookin' For Trouble.
Reception
Reviews were largely positive, with most outlets framing the record as a deliberate course correction. Classic Rock-aligned press welcomed the back-to-basics approach and the return of Corabi. Heavier outlets noted that the album lacks the bite of the band's Burn It Down peak. Several reviews drew the same comparison to Make Some Noise, which is hard to argue with given the Frederiksen-Nashville-Corabi triangle that produced both.
The criticism that surfaced most often was the absence of risk. With every member of the band capable of stylistic surprise, the decision to keep things tight and within genre felt to some reviewers like a missed opportunity. The counter-argument, and one the band themselves have not bothered to make in interviews, is that the Hughes-era records already explored that territory and the audience had spoken. Light 'Em Up reads less as a creative compromise and more as a contractual statement of identity, the band telling their audience who they are now that Corabi is back.
Coverage in the hard rock specialist press treated the album as exactly what it presents itself as. Loudwire, Metal Hammer-aligned outlets and the Classic Rock magazine ecosystem all framed the release in terms of the Corabi reunion and the return to the Frederiksen sound, which the band's promotional materials had foregrounded for months. The album did not generate a serious mainstream rock press review cycle outside that specialist orbit, which is consistent with the band's commercial position. It is also broadly consistent with the way hard rock records have been covered in the streaming era. The album's commercial KPIs sit on Spotify and YouTube monthly listeners rather than on a Billboard 200 chart placing, and on those metrics the Light 'Em Up cycle has performed in line with or marginally above the previous two albums.
The 2024 to 2025 tour cycle
The album's release on 6 September 2024 coincided with the opening night of a substantial UK headline tour, with The Treatment and The Bites as support, the band's most ambitious British run to date. A mainland European leg followed in November with Beasto Blanco and former White Lion frontman Mike Tramp as guests, and it was on this leg that the touring picture got complicated. Doug Aldrich was forced off the road by health issues, and Whitesnake and Winger guitarist Reb Beach stepped in to cover lead guitar across the European dates.
A second European tour followed in March 2025, this time covering Germany, Italy, Switzerland, the Netherlands and France. June 2025 saw a return to mainland Europe including a Graspop slot in Belgium, and an eight-date UK run starting in Belfast on 13 August 2025 closed the Light 'Em Up touring cycle proper. The band's last show of 2025 at the Stonedead Festival in Newark on 23 August was released on streaming platforms as Live At Stonedead on 14 November 2025.
The tour cycle's defining narrative was its overlap with the blues-album side project. By March 2025 the band were debuting Crossroads in the live set alongside the Light 'Em Up material, and by the summer European run the setlists routinely mixed material from both records. For a band that had previously kept its album cycles relatively clean, the decision to bleed the two projects into a single live experience reflected a confidence that the audience had bought into the broader return-of-Corabi narrative rather than any individual record. The December 2025 announcement of UK and European tour dates for March 2027 then formally closed the Light 'Em Up cycle and confirmed that the next studio record would arrive into a touring framework already designed to accommodate it.
Where it sits in the Daisies catalogue
Seven studio albums in, the Dead Daisies discography sorts naturally into eras. The Jon Stevens debut and the Cuba-era Revolucion. The Corabi-Aldrich-Mendoza prime of Make Some Noise and Burn It Down. The Hughes interregnum of Holy Ground and Radiance. And now the second Corabi era, which begins with this record and continues into the band's blues-album side project. Of those four eras, Light 'Em Up belongs decisively to the Make Some Noise lineage. It is the same producer, the same vocalist, the same approach to song length, and the same Nashville studio culture.
What it lacks compared to Make Some Noise is the novelty of Corabi's first-time chemistry with Aldrich. What it adds is a clearer commercial proposition, a tighter ten-track running order, and a band that has spent a year on the road together before going in to record. As the first record of an era it sets a high practical bar even if it does not stretch the artistic envelope.
Verdict
Light 'Em Up is the best Dead Daisies record since 2018 and one of the most consistent in their catalogue. It is not the most ambitious, it is not the most surprising, and it is unlikely to convert anyone who has decided that bands made up of veterans from other bands are inherently second-tier. What it does, and what it does at the level its players have always been capable of, is deliver ten tightly written, well-produced rock songs that hold their shape from the opening hook through to the closing fade. Corabi sounds like he wants to be there, Aldrich plays like he has remembered why he likes rock and roll, and Frederiksen's Nashville production is the most flattering setting the band have had for the songs they actually want to write.
It is a record that knows what it is. That is rarer than it should be, and for a hard rock supergroup approaching its fifteenth year, it is more than enough.
Things you might not know
| Fact | Detail |
|---|---|
| The Corabi return call | The conversation that brought John Corabi back to The Dead Daisies happened in Nashville in April or May 2023, when David Lowy visited him in person and explained that Glenn Hughes was returning to Deep Purple and Black Country Communion duties. |
| The producer reunion | Marti Frederiksen had not produced a Dead Daisies record since Make Some Noise in 2016. His CV in the intervening years included Aerosmith reissue work, Buckcherry projects and Nashville session production for Daughtry and Gavin Rossdale. |
| The supergroup census | Three current members are Whitesnake alumni. Doug Aldrich and Michael Devin played in David Coverdale's Forevermore-era lineup; bassist Marco Mendoza, who passed through earlier Dead Daisies lineups, was also a Whitesnake alumnus. |
| The shortest single window | The title track was released on 10 May 2024 and the album followed on 6 September 2024, a window of under four months. For a band that has traditionally let singles sit for longer ahead of release, this was a tight marketing run. |
| The first Devin studio appearance | Michael Devin joined the band in May 2023 but Light 'Em Up is his first appearance on a Dead Daisies studio recording. His Whitesnake studio credits include Forevermore (2011), The Purple Album (2015) and Flesh and Blood (2019). |
| The release-day tour kickoff | The album was released on 6 September 2024, the same day The Dead Daisies kicked off their UK headline tour. The opening night took place in Glasgow with support from The Treatment and The Bites. |
| The Clufetos return | Tommy Clufetos has now joined the band three separate times. He drummed on the band's 2015 European tour, returned in 2021 to replace Deen Castronovo, and came back again in early 2024 in time for Light 'Em Up. |
| The Aldrich health issues | Doug Aldrich missed the November 2024 European leg of the Light 'Em Up tour due to health issues. Whitesnake and Winger guitarist Reb Beach stepped in, which means the touring lineup of the album cycle briefly featured four Whitesnake alumni at once. |
| The Mike Tramp slot | Former White Lion frontman Mike Tramp appeared as a special guest on the November 2024 European leg, performing the songs of White Lion in support. It was the highest-profile classic-rock guest the band have toured with in a decade. |
| The blues-album pivot | By 30 May 2025, less than nine months after Light 'Em Up, the band released a completely different record, the blues covers album Lookin' For Trouble, fronted by covers of Robert Johnson's Crossroads and John Lee Hooker's Boom Boom. |
| The Stonedead live release | The final show of the 2025 tour cycle, at the Stonedead Festival in Newark on 23 August 2025, was issued as a streaming-only live album, Live At Stonedead, on 14 November 2025. It is the only official live document of the Corabi-Devin-Clufetos lineup performing the Light 'Em Up material. |
| Corabi's previous Daisies tenure | Corabi's first stint as frontman ran from 2015 to January 2019 and produced three studio albums, Revolucion, Make Some Noise and Burn It Down. Light 'Em Up is the fourth Dead Daisies studio record to feature him. |
Riffology podcast
The Riffology podcast covers albums like Light 'Em Up alongside the supergroup careers of every musician on the record, from Doug Aldrich's Whitesnake years to John Corabi's controversial 1994 Motley Crue album to Tommy Clufetos's tenure with the touring Black Sabbath. Episodes are available on every major podcast platform.
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