Classic Rock
Republic Records / Lava · 9 October 2026
The record opens with “Into the Beginning”, one minute forty-two, which works as a doorway rather than a song, and the first real piece is “Tear It Down”, four twenty-three. The two run together as a single entrance: Josh Kiszka puts the shriek up top from the opening bar and the band backs him with the same arena-rock formula that made their name. Mike Elizondo is the new name on this one, and he gives them a wide, clean finish, so that the record sounds less like something cut in 1971 and more like a big 2026 production. Out 9 October on Republic and Lava, three years after “Starcatcher” (2023).
The album is at its best when the band lets something other than its own archive lead. “Lost in the Golden”, four thirty-four, is built on Middle Eastern scales and picks up a colour nothing else here has. “Touch Again”, four fifty-one, adds strings and a demolition-hammer drum part that pushes the song somewhere new. And “Born into This”, six twenty, is the longest of the thirteen and the only one that allows itself to develop an idea rather than repeat it. The second single, “Saw You Stand”, four forty-nine, is a ballad and came out on 31 July; the first had been “Play Your Games”, back in May, when the band put down the break-up rumours its own social post had started.
“Play Your Games”, three fifteen, is the track that doesn’t hold. Kiszka takes the register up to a point where the voice stops singing and starts making noise, and the song hasn’t the body to carry it. It isn’t an isolated accident; it points at what happens across the whole record, which runs fifty-eight minutes and thirteen tracks for a band still working from a very short list of moves. “Heart and the Beat” (three fifty-eight), “Field of Stars” (four forty-four) and “Call My Own” (four thirteen) could swap places without the album noticing.
Jake Kiszka has called it a very modern record and Sam Kiszka has said the music is their palace; the title comes from London’s Alexandra Palace, originally “The Palace of the People”, which the band headlined in 2022. The image of a building open to everyone is a good one and the record serves it halfway: there’s the gesture of opening up, through Elizondo and the scales and the strings, and there’s the fear of losing the audience they already have. Of the four times this band has made an album, this is the closest they’ve come to a risk, and it still stops short.
Rating: 6.5/10
Text by Enric Vilaplana