Taylor Momsen says Dear God feels like The Pretty Reckless‘ debut again, with nothing manufactured and no metaphor to hide behind.
Taylor Momsen has been writing songs for The Pretty Reckless since she was a teenager. Sixteen years on from Light Me Up, she says the new one arrived the same way that first one did.
Speaking to “100.3 The Bear” in Edmonton about Dear God, released on June 26 through Fearless Records, the singer described a record that lost its metaphors somewhere in the writing.
“I went into this album writing it with the same, quote-unquote, process that I always do, which is I write songs… I write songs for myself, so I write songs for me in order to kind of process my life and process me, ’cause I have something in me that I need to express. It’s a tool that I’ve used throughout my entire life and has served me very well. But when I got into the process of this record, it very quickly became apparent that there was a directness to this record that we’ve touched upon on previous albums, but not to this extent. There’s a brutal honesty to this album that is not guised in metaphor. It is just simply laid bare for you all to hear, which I think creates a very, very special record. It’s intimate and vulnerable, but it’s aggressive and brutal and loud, and it kind of does all the things that I want it to do. And the way that I’ve been describing it is it just… I don’t quite know how to, so the way I’ve been saying it is it feels like me. This record feels like me and us in the most genuine way possible, where it almost feels like the first album again, where there’s this purely inspired thing to it that we had on Light Me Up where there’s nothing manufactured about it. It just is. There’s an effortlessness to it. So it has that kind of same energy, but from a much more grown-up and mature perspective. I’ve lived a lot of life, and it’s all in there,” Momsen said (as transcribed by Blabbermouth).
That approach carried into how the songs work on stage. Momsen said the album was recorded close enough to how the band actually sounds that nothing had to be rebuilt for touring.
“Oh, it’s beautiful. It really is,” she continued. “And from a musical standpoint, this album is very unproduced. It’s very basic as to what we sound like, so to take it from the studio and translate it into the live setting has been very simple. It just is. So that in and of itself makes a very fun record to play live because it’s just what we sound like. There’s no affect to it. There’s no pretense. There’s no, ‘How do we take this and strip it back to a three-piece band?’ It just is. And so that kind of raw connection, I think, that we’ve created in the songs themselves is palpable, and it’s felt between me and the audience. And to see their reaction every night of seeing which song is touching which person and that kind of intimate relationship that we have has just been a really beautiful experience so far, and we’re having the best time on this tour.”
She was more candid about what happens the day an album stops being hers.
“To me, there’s stages of things. I always look at the studio — the studio is for me. The writing of the record and the recording of the record, that’s mine. And then once you’ve released the record, there’s almost this… I always say there’s a moment on release day of very real but brief sadness, where I’m going, ‘I’m giving a piece of myself away. I’m giving this collection of songs and this thing that was just mine away to the world, and it no longer belongs to me. What it means to me and what I was writing about and my story and my everything, it doesn’t exist anymore. It belongs to the audience.’ And that’s the point. And so when you get out on the road and you start playing these songs and you start seeing the reactions firsthand, there’s this very beautiful thing that happens where the songs transform themselves into everyone else’s story. And it’s just a very cool feeling that kind of never gets old, and it’s never redundant because it’s different every single night. And it’s just awesome. That kind of circle of music is so cool to witness firsthand.”
Dear God runs to 14 tracks, all written by Momsen and guitarist Ben Phillips, who produced alongside her and Jonathan Wyman as they have on the band’s previous records. Bassist Mark Damon and drummer Jamie Perkins complete the lineup.
Lead single “For I Am Death” arrived in August 2025 as the band’s first new music in four years and topped Billboard‘s Mainstream Rock Airplay chart, their eighth number one on that chart and fourth in a row. It is the most by any woman-fronted act in the chart’s 44-year history, a record previously held by Halestorm. “When I Wake Up” followed in March, with “Love Me” and the title track issued ahead of release.
The “Dear God” tour opened in Raleigh, North Carolina on July 10 and takes in Chicago, New Orleans, Dallas and Los Angeles before crossing to Europe, finishing in Glasgow on December 3. It follows two years supporting AC/DC on the “Power Up” tour.
The past year also brought Momsen to the 2026 MusiCares Person Of The Year gala, where she performed in tribute to Mariah Carey alongside Foo Fighters, and to the 2025 Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame ceremony, where she sang with Soundgarden at their induction. The band’s holiday EP Taylor Momsen’s Pretty Reckless Christmas produced a reworked “Where Are You Christmas?” that reached number one on Billboard‘s Hot Hard Rock Songs chart.
