There is something about uttering the words, “Hey man, have you checked out the new Cheap Trick album?” in the year 2025 that doesn’t just seem surreal, but teeters on the edge of absurdity. Even the band themselves, now well into their 70s, can’t help but acknowledge this with the tongue-in-cheek title of their 21st studio album, All Washed Up. Only Cheap Trick AREN’T that. No, quite the contrary. The only thing more absurd than the band who put the “Rock” in Rockford still releasing new music in 2025 is the fact that they’re still releasing GOOD music in 2025.
Having been on an endless tour of casinos, theaters, county fairs, and the occasional Live Nation-produced nostalgia package as a support act since, well, probably my entire odd lifetime of 26 years, there’s no doubt that the live stage has served as Cheap Trick’s main focus for the better part of this century. After all, this is a band who broke with one of the greatest live albums ever made, and their reputation as one of rock’s premiere live acts remains intact nearly half a century later. Yet when they get the itch, and they do from time to time, Cheap Trick will hop into the studio, conjure up their signature hard rock/power pop/singer-songwriter magick over 10 or so songs, and voila! You’ve got yourself an album such as All Washed Up.
Now in the case of All Washed Up, upon first listen, this seems to be the band’s hardest edged album in quite some time. Sure, their last album, In Another World (2021), boasted its fair share of hard rock moments, but seemed largely more rooted in feelgood power pop. All Washed Up, on the other hand, could’ve simply been titled The Rick Nielsen Show, as everyone’s second favorite schoolboy guitarist’s ferocious riff attack dominates the release from start to finish. Whether it be balls-out hard rockers like the title track or “The Riff That Won’t Quit”, or the brooding “Bet It All”, which is the closest the band has come to doom metal (you need to hear it to believe it), Nielsen’s straightforward six string stylings stand front and center. This at times results in a latter day Iron Maiden effect, where the Man of 1,000 Voices, Robin Zander, will sound as if he’s singing a room away while the band bashes away one power chord at a time.
When we can hear Zander on par with the rest of his bandmates, his vocals remain chameleonic as ever, effortlessly shifting shades and moods from tune to tune, and perhaps shining brightest on the album’s gentler moments. For those who might find All Washed Up‘s front half too menacing and heavy, it’s the back end that comes off as the album’s “pop side”, featuring some of their most captivating compositions in recent memory. There’s a vulnerability to the lyrics and arrangements of cuts like “Twelve Gates”, “Bad Blood”, and “Love Gone” that channel the band’s ’80s wilderness years, specifically the enigma of the Todd Rundgren-produced Next Position Please (1983). Yet as the heady atmospheric hard rock of “A Long Way to Worcester” winds this album down, and the novelty that is “Wham Boom Bang” brings us officially to close, Cheap Trick reminds us that even in these sunset years, anything goes.
Production qualms and overreliance on choruses aside (even more so than usual for these high priests of power pop), All Washed Up is yet another welcome entry into the vast Cheap Trick canon. Is it ’70s era caliber of brilliant? Absolutely not. If anything, All Washed Up could pass as the wise grandpa to Heaven Tonight or Dream Police. Even if you can’t teach an old dog new tricks, sometimes the old trick is all you need. And when the old trick is Cheap Trick, it hits the spot every single time.
8 out of 10
Label: BMG
Genre: Hard Rock
For fans of: KISS, Enuff Z’Nuff, Todd Rundgren