Freedom (2022)
1. Together We Run
2. Don't Give Up On Us
3. Still Believe in Love
4. You Got the Best of Me
5. Live to Love Again
6. The Way We Used To Be
7. Come Away With Me
8. After Glow
9. Let it Rain
10.Holdin' On
11.All Day and All Night
12.Don't Go
13.United We Stand
14.Life Rolls On
15.Beautiful As You Are
Janis Joplin once sang "Freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose". How unfortunate, then, that Journey have taken that sentiment so literally. Because on Freedom, their fifteenth studio album, they seem to have lost everything—cohesion, conviction, purpose—and left us with precisely nothing to gain. The listener is left with a single, nagging question: why?
To even begin to assess this bloated affair, one must first marvel at the sheer dysfunction that is the modern-day Journey. If there were awards for internal squabbling, this band would be platinum certified. Lineup stability? Forget it. They’ve never managed more than two consecutive albums with the same personnel. For Freedom, both Ross Valory and Steve Smith were shown the door—again. Allegedly for attempting a boardroom coup. And the vitriol between Neal Schon and Jonathan Cain? Tiresome, public, and deeply embarrassing. It’s like watching two aging gladiators in a legal cage match. Even Arnel Pineda, the band’s indefatigable frontman, has voiced his disillusionment. The wheels aren’t just falling off. They’re scattered across the interstate.
So again—why make this record at all? If the band needs money (and one suspects they do), surely a few dozen greatest hits tours would suffice. The fans don’t want new material—they want Separate Ways and Don’t Stop Believin’ and a whiff of 1982. Instead, we’re subjected to over an hour—seventy-five minutes!—of half-formed, half-hearted, creatively bankrupt drivel. It’s not that the songs are irredeemable; it’s that no one involved appears to care enough to redeem them.
There are moments—fleeting, tragically undeveloped—where you can hear the ghost of potential. A chord progression here, a melody there. But there’s no energy. No fight. No spark. The whole enterprise sounds as if it were recorded under contractual duress, with each member grimacing through their parts like hostages reading a ransom note. What this album so desperately needs is what its best predecessors had in spades: punch, propulsion, purpose. Instead, Freedom arrives enervated, limp, and entirely joyless.
It's 180 degress different from it's predecessor, the awful Eclipse, That album had all the bluster and sonic muscle of a real rock album but none of the songwriting to back it up. Freedom is its inverted twin: slightly better melodies, yet absolutely no soul. If Eclipse was generic cheese smothered in amplifier fuzz, then Freedom is undercooked meat served cold with a shrug.
At fifteen tracks, this is an endurance test disguised as a comeback. By song five, you’ll glance at the runtime and groan—two-thirds still to go. The experience is not unlike running a marathon with ankle weights: it can be done, but one questions the necessity.
Perhaps, in some parallel universe, a producer like Roy Thomas Baker or Mike Stone could have salvaged this wreckage—added sheen, structure, tension. But then we must ask, would that have been enough? Can polish redeem an album so visibly devoid of inspiration?
The Journey of the past fifty years—tumultuous though it’s been—has yielded some genuinely transcendent moments. But this latest chapter offers only diminishing returns and deepening regret. Maybe, just maybe, the ride should finally be over.
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