The Pretty Reckless

From Cindy Lou Who to the Annex

Taylor Momsen was born in St Louis on 26 July 1993 and was working professionally by the age of three, appearing in a Shake 'n Bake commercial in 1997. The part that defined her childhood was Cindy Lou Who in How the Grinch Stole Christmas in 2000; the part that defined her teens was Jenny Humphrey on Gossip Girl, which she played from 2007 to 2010 and again in the 2012 finale. She has since described child acting as alienating, and spoken about the bullying that followed the Grinch.

The band that became her exit route formed in New York in 2009 and played its first concert on 5 May that year at the Annex. Interscope signed them in March 2009, and the debut album Light Me Up arrived on 27 August 2010. By August 2011 Momsen was telling Elle that she had quit acting altogether to concentrate on music — a decision she has never walked back, and one that took roughly a decade of hard-rock radio to stop being treated as a novelty.

Four albums and seven number ones

The catalogue runs Light Me Up (2010, Interscope), Going to Hell (2014) and Who You Selling For (2016), both on Razor & Tie, and Death by Rock and Roll (2021) on Fearless Records. The current line-up — Momsen on lead vocals and rhythm guitar, Ben Phillips on lead guitar, Mark Damon on bass and Jamie Perkins on drums — has been stable for the bulk of that run, and Phillips has co-written and co-produced throughout.

Their most durable achievement is a radio one: when the title track of Death by Rock and Roll went to the top of the US Mainstream Rock chart, The Pretty Reckless became the first female-fronted band to take seven singles to number one there. The records around it were made through real damage. Kato Khandwala, the producer who shaped the band's first three albums, was killed in a motorcycle accident in April 2018, and Momsen has said openly that his death wrecked her mental health during the writing that followed.

Chris Cornell remains the touchstone she returns to in interviews. Speaking to NME this year she described his work as something that reveals new meaning on every listen — a never-ending onion — and praised the combination of depth, sensitivity and aggression that she has clearly been chasing in her own writing.

Dear God, written between AC/DC shows

Dear God was announced on 13 March 2026 alongside the single When I Wake Up, and released on 26 June 2026 through Fearless Records: fourteen tracks, a little over fifty minutes, produced by Momsen, Phillips and Jonathan Wyman. For I Am Death had gone out ahead of it on 22 August 2025, with Love Me following on 17 April 2026 and the title track on 22 May.

The record was written and cut in the gaps of the band's long opening stint on AC/DC's Power Up tour, which ran from May 2024 into the autumn of 2026. Momsen has called that split existence a new kind of experience — playing old material to stadium crowds at night while building something unfamiliar in the day. Her description of the result is blunt: it feels directly ripped out of her diary, with an honesty and a brutality to it. Of the lead single she said simply that it is the story of a dream becoming a nightmare, a life of excess on a rollercoaster that is doomed to crash.

Reviews were strong rather than unanimous. Blabbermouth gave it 8.5 out of 10 and called it dirty, authentic rock music with a touch of polish; Distorted Sound scored it 8 and called it their best album to date; Kerrang! gave four stars and praised a darker set containing some of their best songs; AllMusic was cooler at three stars. Commercially it is their biggest UK showing yet — number six on the Official Albums Chart and number two on the Rock & Metal chart, with number four in Austria and number 79 on the Billboard 200.

Where they stand this autumn

The eighteen months around the album have been unusually busy outside the band's own schedule. Momsen released a Christmas EP in October 2025 featuring a new recording of Where Are You Christmas?, performed at the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade in November 2025, and appeared with Foo Fighters at the MusiCares gala in February 2026. On 9 September 2026 she sang with Soundgarden at a Seattle Seahawks halftime show.

The band's own autumn was festival-heavy: Louder than Life in Louisville on 18 September, Aftershock in Sacramento on 1 October, and Tom Morello's Power to the People festival on 3 October. Mid-October brought a video for About You (Bonus Version), a reworking of the Dear God closer with added drums and vocals from Dave Grohl and guitar from Pat Smear, cut together from backstage footage, studio sessions and Smear playing onstage with the band.

Ahead of them is the overseas half of the campaign: a European leg from Madrid on 9 November through Barcelona, Milan, Prague, Berlin, Cologne, Amsterdam and Paris, then a UK run that finishes at Glasgow's Barrowland Ballroom on 3 December. Two Indian dates are booked for late January 2027, in Bengaluru on the 29th and Mumbai on the 31st, with Welcome to Rockville in Daytona Beach in May.

The tour as a business

The Dear God world tour was announced on 13 March 2026 as a 31-stop run, with an artist presale on 17 March and general on-sale on 20 March. The North American leg opened at The Ritz in Raleigh on 10 July and closed at The Fillmore Silver Spring on 26 September, routed through theatres rather than clubs: the Wiltern in Los Angeles, the Moore in Seattle, the Ryman in Nashville. Two Ultimate VIP packages per market included early entry, a signed Fender Squier and a signed setlist.

That is a significant step up in room size. Pollstar's figure for the band's most recent headline show before the campaign was a $39,295 gross at Buffalo's Electric City in May 2025 — a club number. The stadium slots kept running alongside their own dates, with the band opening for AC/DC at Bank of America Stadium in Charlotte on 11 July and at Lincoln Financial Field in Philadelphia on 29 September, between their own headline nights.

The UK and European leg carries two support acts: Brighton's Yonaka across the continental dates and into Bristol on 26 November, and London's The Cruel Knives on the remaining UK shows through to Glasgow.

Onstage now

The headline sets are running to roughly an hour and a half. At The Fillmore Detroit on 13 July the band were onstage at 9.10pm and finished at 10.35pm — 85 minutes for fourteen songs — following doug. and Paris Jackson, who played at 8pm.

The Ryman show on 3 September was the band's second appearance at the venue and their first as headliners, and it sold out. The review in 100% Rock Magazine recorded fifteen songs plus an encore, heavy on big riffs, extended jams and spoken introductions, with Momsen conducting the crowd's volume by raising and lowering her arms and the singing from the floor among the loudest the writer had heard in the room. She changed outfits for the encore and told the audience it was being filmed for a music video with the Ryman in the final cut.

Momsen's own description of the format is a promise about method rather than spectacle: high-energy live rock and roll with no click tracks, four musicians playing together, and shows she argues cannot be imitated.