All Washed Up (2025)
1. All Washed Up
2. All Wrong Long Gone
3. The Riff That Won't Quit
4. Bet it All
5. The Best Thing
6. Twelve Gates
7. Bad Blood
8. Dancing with the Band
9. Love Gone
10.A Long Way to Worcester
11.Wham Boom Bang
One of the more reassuring aspects of modern rock music is discovering that certain veteran artists remain committed to creating new material long after commercial success has ceased to be a primary motivation. Plenty of bands from the 1970s continue to tour successfully, drawing upon nostalgia and extensive back catalogs, but relatively few maintain a consistent schedule of new studio releases. Cheap Trick have become one of the notable exceptions. Including their Christmas Christmas album from 2017, this release marks their fifth collection of new material in the span of only nine years, an impressive achievement for a group whose reputation was established decades ago.
Not that these records are competing for platinum certification. Those days belong to another era. The audience now consists primarily of dedicated followers, collectors, and longtime admirers who have remained loyal throughout the band's many incarnations. Yet there is something admirable about this arrangement. Cheap Trick no longer record because they have to; they record because they still enjoy doing so. Better still, they continue to do it remarkably well.
As with all of the band's recent releases, Julian Raymond once again handles production duties. His presence has become both a blessing and a slight limitation. On the positive side, Raymond thoroughly understands the Cheap Trick formula: loud guitars, powerful rhythms, sharp melodies, and choruses designed to remain lodged in the listener's memory. The downside is that many of these latter-day albums possess a remarkably similar sonic character. One occasionally struggles to distinguish one release from another. Fortunately, the quality of the songwriting remains high enough that this rarely becomes a significant issue.
The strongest material reminds the listener why Cheap Trick have endured for so long. Twelve Gates, Love Gone, All Wrong Long Gone, and particularly A Long Way to Worcester showcase the band's greatest strengths. These songs combine muscular rock arrangements with memorable hooks, demonstrating that the group has lost little of its instinct for crafting engaging, energetic music.
Not everything succeeds. Bet It All feels somewhat repetitive and lacks the spark found elsewhere on the record, though its brief running time prevents it from becoming overly tiresome. The closing Wham Boom Bang reaches toward the vaudevillian eccentricities that occasionally surfaced during the band's classic years, but the comparison to How Are You? from Heaven Tonight is unavoidable, and the newer composition doesn't quite measure up.
One cannot help but think back to comments made years ago by former drummer Bun E. Carlos, who suggested that additional Cheap Trick albums were unlikely because recording new material had become financially impractical. Ironically, it was only after his departure that the band entered one of the most productive periods of their career. Whether coincidence or not, the results have been enormously rewarding for longtime fans.
Ultimately, releases such as this may never reach a mass audience, but that hardly seems important. They demonstrate that Cheap Trick remain capable of producing thoughtful, energetic, and highly enjoyable rock music well into their later years. For those who have followed the band from the beginning, that is more than enough. The only real question is how much longer this remarkable run can continue.
Go back to the main page