Review Summary: Alter Bridge's 8th album sees them at their weakest.
Over the last two decades, Alter Bridge have become one of the most popular modern stadium rock bands—with a appeal built largely on Mark Tremonti’s huge riffs and solos and Myles Kennedy’s soaring vocals where he belts out their skyscraper-high choruses. Their sound has always been super accessible, radio-friendly, and big on the “emotional epic rock” energy. But now, two decades later, they’re on their eighth record—this new self-titled album. And the question is: does it do anything to evolve their sound?
For the past 14 years, Mark Tremonti has also been pouring tons of energy into his own solo project. And honestly? The output from Tremonti’s solo albums over this period has surpassed Alter Bridge’s output over the same time-span. On top of that, Tremonti, Brian Marshall, and Scott Phillips have all been busy with the Creed reunion tours. Whether you love Creed or love to meme on Creed, those shows have been successful—and they clearly shifted time, energy, and songwriting attention away from Alter Bridge. So now Alter Bridge returns with a self-titled album—usually the signal of a band redefining or re-centering itself—but instead it feels like a band two decades into its career, with a very defined formula, and not much desire (or creative bandwidth) to deviate from it.
This album sticks extremely closely to Alter Bridge’s established formula: big riffs, clean production, mid-tempo hard rock, and rote themes about perseverance, darkness, and redemption. It all feels very samey. The album essentially has the format of swerving from one dark-ish, edgy, almost alt-metal sounding track to a wet weepy “uplifting” track, back to edgy track, and back again.. and that exact pattern literally happens all the way through. It’s very predictable.
One of the biggest surprises here—unfortunately—is Myles Kennedy’s choruses. The man is known for legendary, high-flying hooks. Think of the best Alter Bridge songs:
“Open Your Eyes”,
“Broken Wings”,
“Rise Today”,
“Addicted to Pain”. These are defined by Myles singing his ass off. But here the choruses are just bafflingly weak.
On top of this, the songwriting (never the band's strength) across the album feels generic, beige, and honestly stale. Parts that try to sound dark just don’t have enough edge as their idea of 'dark' is just too vanilla.
There are very minor moments where they deviate away from the formula.
"Scale Are Falling" has some good guitar work from Tremonti and a vaguely spacey vibe. And the section before and through the solo is one of the albums better moments. But again, Myles’s vocal power feels MIA and fails to match the highs the guitars seem to be trying to pull the track towards.
"Slave To Master", clocking in at 9 minutes, ticks the box for an “epic” album closer. To be fair, the larger scale evoked on the track does play to the bands strengths and it ends up being one of the better tracks on the album. The extended solo from Tremonti is very good, but the melancholic vibe of the song just leaves the album ending on a downer note - which is not what you want from an AB record.
If you’re a long-time Alter Bridge fan and you just want more Alter Bridge, you’ll probably enjoy this. But if you're hoping for something fresh, or something that hits the emotional highs of their early catalog, this album is going to feel like a disappointment.
