Riffology Score: 92/100
Five years between albums and two of them spent actually recording this one, and you can hear where the time went. Dear God is the first Pretty Reckless record that doesn't sound like it's trying to prove something.
Album Details and Background
Dear God arrived on 26 June 2026 through Fearless Records, the fifth Pretty Reckless studio album and their first set of new songs since Death by Rock and Roll in 2021. The lineup has not moved: Taylor Momsen on vocals and rhythm guitar, Ben Phillips on guitar and a good deal else besides, Mark Damon on bass, Jamie Perkins on drums. Jonathan Wyman produced alongside Momsen and Phillips, and engineered and mixed it as well, which is the same arrangement that made the last one.
So the credits tell you nothing. The five years tell you plenty. COVID took the Death by Rock and Roll touring cycle away, and Momsen has said the stretch that followed felt close to a hiatus. The band filled it with Other Worlds, a 2022 set of covers and acoustic reworkings, then a Christmas EP in 2025 and a long run opening for AC/DC. Then in February 2025 her old Gossip Girl co-star Michelle Trachtenberg died at 39, and one of these fourteen songs is about that.
Album Facts
| Field | Detail |
|---|---|
| Artist | The Pretty Reckless |
| Album | Dear God |
| Release Date | 26 June 2026 |
| Label | Fearless Records |
| Producers | Jonathan Wyman, Taylor Momsen, Ben Phillips |
| Genre | Hard rock, post-grunge, blues rock |
| Track Count | 14 |
| Total Runtime | 50:08 |
| Lead Single | For I Am Death (22 August 2025) |
| Notable Chart Peaks | UK #6, Scotland #2, Austria #4, US Billboard 200 #79, US Independent Albums #13 |
| Riffology Score | 92/100 |
Album Analysis
"For I Am Death" is an odd choice of lead single and a very good one. It does not sprint anywhere. It plants a boot on a stop-start riff and stands there, and Momsen delivers it low and long-vowelled, more sermon than chorus, until the thing finally opens up near the end. That's a confident way to announce a comeback after four years of silence. It went to number one on Mainstream Rock Airplay anyway, their eighth, which is more than any other woman-fronted group has managed in the chart's forty-four years.
"When I Wake Up" is the opposite, and it's the nastiest thing on here. Punk tempo, blues-rock weight sitting underneath it, Momsen half-shouting her way through a lyric about a good time curdling into something worse. It'll open the live set for the next two years. I'd have put it later on the record.
What surprised me is how much of this isn't rock at all. "Dragonfire" begins as acoustic folk, all rhythmic strumming and no drums, then slides sideways into a psychedelic haze without ever raising its voice. "Rollercoaster of Life" rides a breezy funk bounce that has no business working as well as it does. "Dark Days" brings the main body of the record home on a slow seventies groove closer to Fleetwood Mac than to anything else in this band's catalogue. Fourteen tracks is a lot to ask of anyone, and if what you want is the lean, mean version of this band, that record exists and it's called Going to Hell. This one is built to be sat with instead.
The title track is the best thing here. Six minutes, which looks indulgent written down and turns out to be the one place the album needed the room. It builds off a beat rather than a riff, holds back far longer than you expect, and when Momsen finally lets go it is the strongest singing of her career. Not close, either. She's described the song as desperation set to music, and for once the artist's summary is the accurate one.
"Dear God is desperation set to music. When life gets that physical, that brutal, you leave your body and start begging something bigger than yourself to pull you out."
Taylor Momsen, 2026
Three fragments called "Life Evermore" are scattered through the album, none of them longer than forty-four seconds, sequenced Pt. 2, then Pt. 3, then Pt. 1. So it opens in the middle and finishes at the beginning. I spent two listens waiting for Pt. 1 to turn up and felt faintly cheated when it arrived last, which I accept is my problem and not the band's. There's a cross on the sleeve with an arrow tapering down out of it, and she's sitting at a school desk in more or less the uniform she wore sixteen years ago on Light Me Up, facing the wall. I don't know what to do with that either.
Tracklist
- Life Evermore Pt. 2
- For I Am Death
- When I Wake Up
- Love Me
- Dragonfire
- Dear God
- Life Evermore Pt. 3
- About You
- Spell on You
- Rollercoaster of Life
- Eye of the Storm
- Devil in Disguise (Michelle's Song)
- Dark Days
- Life Evermore Pt. 1
Standout Tracks
Dragonfire. The one I didn't see coming and now the one I reach for first. Phillips plays it like a folk musician rather than a rock guitarist, and the haze that creeps in around the two-minute mark is the most interesting texture on the album by some way.
Devil in Disguise (Michelle's Song). Two minutes forty, almost no production on it, and Momsen has said it was written and recorded in a single day. You can tell, and that's the point. It's the one moment where the record stops performing its grief and just sits in it.
Dark Days. Five minutes fifty of weary seventies groove, and the closest this band have come to sounding like they've made peace with something. It does not resolve. It just stops being angry, which is a harder trick.
Tour and Conclusion
The Dear God Tour opened in North America on 10 July and runs through to 26 September, with a good chunk of those dates spent opening for AC/DC, a job this band have now done often enough that Momsen has been bitten by two different animals while doing it. Europe follows from 9 November in Madrid, and the UK leg starts on 28 November taking in Bristol, Wolverhampton, Manchester, London and Glasgow, finishing at the Barrowland on 3 December. Support acts weren't confirmed at the time of writing.
Here's where it sits. Death by Rock and Roll was a record about losing people, made close enough to the losing that it could only really shout about it. Dear God is about the five years afterwards, and it's got the range to carry that, folk and funk and psych and one enormous prayer of a title track. If Who You Selling For is the Pretty Reckless album you keep going back to, the one where the blues got in and the radio stopped mattering, this is the record that idea has been waiting a decade for. It's the best thing they've made.
Tell me the back half sags and I'll sit you down with "Dark Days" one more time.
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