The Pretty Reckless release haunting title track ‘Dear God’ from their fifth album, out June 26 via Fearless Records, as Taylor Momsen calls it desperation set to music
Five years after Death by Rock and Roll announced their return with a ferocity that most rock bands spend entire careers chasing, The Pretty Reckless are a month away from their fifth studio album and building toward it single by single with a precision that suggests they know exactly what they have. On May 22 they released “Dear God,” the title track from the upcoming record of the same name, due June 26 via Fearless Records. It is the band’s fourth single from the album and its most emotionally exposed one yet.
The track opens with restraint. Where lead single “For I Am Death” arrived as a serrated declaration and “When I Wake Up“ leaned hard into punk-driven momentum, “Dear God” moves slowly, building from Taylor Momsen’s commanding vocal at its center toward an electrifying guitar solo that arrives like a release valve being opened. The chorus is plain and devastating: “Dear God, can you lift me up, can you take me higher / Dear God, can you lift me up, keep me from a fire.” There is no metaphor obscuring the desperation. The song does not hide what it is.
Momsen on What the Song Actually Is
Momsen described “Dear God” with the same directness the song itself operates in. “Dear God is desperation set to music,” she said in a statement. “When life gets that physical, that brutal, you leave your body and start begging something bigger than yourself to pull you out. That space between heaven and hell isn’t a metaphor. It’s somewhere you actually live.”
The song arrives as the fourth piece of a 14-track album whose tracklist has been gradually coming into focus. The full Dear God record opens with “Life Evermore Part 2,” moves through “For I Am Death,” “When I Wake Up,” “Love Me,” “Dragonfire,” and the title track at position six, before continuing through “Life Evermore Part 3,” “About You,” “Spell On You,” and closing with “Devil in Disguise (Michelle’s Song).”
The “Life Evermore” structure, split across three parts and used to bookend the record, signals a project built around arc rather than sequence. The band has described it as their most emotionally raw and uncompromising work, written with what they call diaristic honesty.
The commercial context for that ambition is significant. “For I Am Death” became The Pretty Reckless’ eighth No. 1 on Billboard’s Mainstream Rock Airplay chart, the most by any woman-fronted act in the chart’s history. Their fourth consecutive chart-topper, it continued a streak that began in 2020 with “Death by Rock and Roll.” Current single “When I Wake Up” is sitting at No. 4 on the same chart. An exclusive, limited-edition vinyl pressing of Dear God on “Tan Smoke”-tinted wax is available for pre-order via Revolver’s shop, limited to 500 copies.
A Year That Already Looks Historic
The single’s release comes at the end of a 12-month stretch that would constitute a career highlight for most artists. In 2025, The Pretty Reckless completed a two-year run as direct support on AC/DC’s PWR UP Tour, one of the highest-profile rock tour placements in years. Momsen performed alongside Soundgarden at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony.
The band appeared at the MusiCares Person of the Year Gala honoring Mariah Carey, sharing the stage with the Foo Fighters. And their holiday EP, Taylor Momsen’s Pretty Reckless Christmas, produced a version of “Where Are You Christmas?” that reached No. 1 on the Billboard Hot Hard Rock Songs chart, a detail that speaks to how wide the band’s reach has become.
The Dear God world tour launches in North America this summer with dates in New Orleans, Dallas, and Los Angeles before heading to Europe. The band will also continue playing dates opening for AC/DC alongside their own headline run. For a band that has spent fifteen years proving that rock with real emotional stakes still finds an audience, DEAR GOD arrives as the clearest argument yet that they have not run out of things to say about the human condition, or the musical vocabulary to say them.
Dear God is out June 26 via Fearless Records. “Dear God,” the single, is out now.
