Beatles

German black-thrashers Witching Hour embrace their heavy metal side.

Last November, Taylor Momsen watched her past arrange itself with uncanny precision. She stood in rehearsal with Sound­garden — the group that helped shape her musical identity — preparing to sing “Black Hole Sun” and “Rusty Cage” at their Rock Roll Hall of Fame induction. At one point, she asked who would be inducting them. “Jim Carrey,” said drummer Matt Cameron. “Shut the fuck up,” she replied. Momsen hadn’t seen Carrey in 25 years, not since the set of How the Grinch Stole Christmas, the film that introduced her to the world as Cindy Lou Who at just seven years old — a role that would follow her long before she had the chance to define herself. By her early teens, her profile continued to rise, star­ring as Jenny Humphrey on Gossip Girl while also modeling in campaigns for John Galliano and Madonna’s fashion line. It was a version of herself the world quickly fixed in place. Music, meanwhile, had been there all along. Momsen sang “Where Are You Christmas?” in the Grinch movie and later be­came obsessed with rock through her father’s record collec­tion. As she got older, music felt more honest than playing characters, and in 2009 she launched the Pretty Reckless to follow that impulse. “I formed the Pretty Reckless when I was 14,” she says, “but the journey started when I was two years old.” Now 32, she’s preparing to release the band’s fifth album, Dear God, the latest chapter in a career that has made the Pret­ty Reckless a dominant force in modern rock. It’s also a mo­ment of convergence, one that finds Momsen reckoning with every version of herself at once. Sarah Lenoir The Pretty Reckless — anchored by longtime members Ben Phillips (guitar), Mark Damon (bass) and Jamie Perkins (drums) — quickly established a foothold on rock radio with a sound that felt heavy, deliberate and full of teeth. Their 2010 debut, Light Me Up, broke through on the Billboard charts, with “Make Me Wanna Die” pushing them into the mainstream. Since then, the Pretty Reckless have earned the admiration of Momsen’s heroes — from Mick Jagger to Mariah Carey — opened for the Rolling Stones and AC/DC, and collaborated with Tom Morello and Soundgarden’s Kim Thayil and Matt Cameron on 2021’s Death by Rock and Roll. That same year, Momsen also lent her vocals to “Use My Voice” off Evanes­cence’s The Bitter Truth. Last fall, the lead single from Dear God, “For I Am Death,” hit No. 1 on Billboard’s Mainstream Rock Airplay chart — their eighth No. 1 overall, making them the first band led by a woman to reach that milestone. Most people read Momsen’s musical career as a clean break, a decisive separation between the person Momsen understands herself to be and the child star whose ca­reer began before she could fully claim it as her own. The Rock Hall ceremony collapsed that distance, stitching the fragments of her life together. In that moment, Carrey was the conduit. Years earlier, the actor had agreed to host Saturday Night Live on the condition that Soundgarden appear as the musical guest. Momsen jokes that during the filming of Grinch, Carrey listened to the band while enduring the hours-long, physically punishing pro­cess of transforming into the prosthetic-and-green-fur covered titular character. Standing onstage, pre­paring to sing with Soundgarden — with Jim Carrey about to reenter her orbit — Momsen could trace the continuity of her life story in real time. The distance between Cindy Lou Who and the person she had be­come seemed, finally, to resolve. “The rollercoaster of life is so nice, if you do it well you can go through it twice,” Momsen sings on Dear God’s “Rollercoaster of Life.” It’s both a manifestation and an encapsulation of where she’s at now. Momsen is on her second go-around, revisiting the touchstones of her past on her own terms: re-recording “Where Are You Christmas?” for last year’s Taylor Momsen’s Pretty Reckless Christ­mas EP — effectively duetting with her younger self, whose original vocals open the song — and perform­ing it at the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, while also nodding to Jenny Humphrey in visuals for this new Dear God era. Her most Humphrey-coded return comes in the new “When I Wake Up” video, which brings in former Gossip Girl co-stars Jessica Szohr and Connor Paolo. Co-directed by Momsen, the video is shot without gloss or filters, revisiting a period of her life she has described as out of control: chasing distraction, crashing out. “I’ve reached a point where I’m accepting all as­pects of the life I’ve led,” she says. “There was a time where I held a lot of, for lack of a better term, resent­ment. Now I’m bringing everything into my future.” This shift has allowed her to be her “most genuine self — which is a very freeing place to be, instead of kicking things over your shoulder constantly.” That sense of return shapes the new record. Dear God pulls from the full span of Momsen’s experience, personal and musical, and runs it back through the sounds that first defined her. The songs move from blues-weighted riffs into expansive psychedelia, trac­ing a lineage as much as a biography. Steph Gomez Momsen is reflecting on all of this from a hotel room between tour dates with AC/DC. She keeps her bearings through repetition. “Where am I again?” she asks, then answers: “Buenos Aires, Buenos Aires.” She inhales from a fluorescent green vape, blowing out plumes of smoke between questions. Outside, fans have gathered in numbers, forming a perimeter around the hotel. “It’s kind of tricky to leave,” she says. Momsen, who at this point looks jacked, has been making the most of the hotel gym, pushing herself to lift more than her bodyweight. “It’s my healthy addiction,” she says. In some ways she’s changed, but Momsen still wears the same uniform she chose as a teenager: dark eyeshadow drawn wide across her lids, a leather jacket, necklaces layered at the throat, a cross resting among them. She carries the look forward because it still feels like her. That sense of self comes, in part, from a sustained effort to reclaim her own memories. Momsen’s life has long been refracted through screens and other people’s versions of events. “When I think back to Grinch times especially, it’s a bit odd,” she says. “Like, how much do I actually remember? And how much do I remember as I’ve been told the story, as I’ve seen it on film? My entire life has been recorded.” Mauricio Santana/Getty Images A few Christmases ago, she went home and tried to piece together her own version of events, starting from the very beginning. She rummaged through her parents’ closets, pulled out boxes of VHS tapes, fed them into an old camera, and watched the unedited versions of herself — before she was ever captured on film for the rest of the world. Now, Momsen says, she’s “alert to the universe.” The more she revisits her past, the more she notices strange alignments, like her reunion with Carrey. The very first tape she watched mirrored a Dear God track she had just finished, “Spell On You,” which treats witchcraft as both metaphor and method. Pressing play, she watched her younger self say something uncannily similar: “I’m a bad witch.” That audio is now sampled in the song. Some artists write toward the future. Momsen writes back, using songcraft to move through the full arc of her life. Music is what ultimately binds it all together. Born on July 26th — sharing a birthday with Mick Jagger — Momsen likes to say that rock roll brought her into the world. Her mother listened to the Beat­les throughout labor, and as soon as Momsen could sit upright, her father began her musical education. They spent Sundays in the basement together, rifling through the family’s enormous record collection. He played David Bowie, Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones, Pink Floyd, breaking the songs down into their con­stituent parts, explaining their genius. Her father, who played in bands and later worked as a roadie for Aerosmith, instilled in her the conviction that rock roll is the highest form of art. Today, Mom­sen is one of its most instinctive practitioners. She’s always spoken its language fluently, never needing to formally learn song structure or theory. She wrote her first song before she became Cindy Lou Who. “Music has always been how I understand myself and the world, it’s how I process life,” she says. Before her fifth birthday, she was already using it to process death. Momsen was a sensitive, introspective child. She loved animals, but constant travel kept her from hav­ing one of her own. She fixated on a portrait of her fa­ther’s dead dog that hung in his workshop. It inspired her first song, dedicated entirely to an animal she had never met. When she played it for him, he broke down in tears. “I started writing songs at five years old — that’s who I am,” she says. “But then I became known worldwide for playing a character that was so outside myself, and that was so hard for me.” Steph Gomez Around the time she began playing Jenny Humphrey on Gossip Girl, the tension became harder to ignore. “Music is what I love,” she says. “So why was I doing that and this other thing? Why was I trying to appease a decision that I never made for myself?” Like most teenagers, Momsen rejected the author­ity imposed upon her. At her preppy Catholic school in Maryland, she showed up in Chuck Taylors and a leather jacket while her classmates wore Abercrom­bie Fitch. In interviews, she met insipid, incurious questions with a sharp side-eye. The press attempted to cast her as a cautionary tale, drawing lazy parallels to figures like Lindsay Lohan and projecting a familiar narrative of the child actor in decline. In reality, it was simpler than that. Momsen just liked to laugh. “I think I got this bad rep because I just find my­self wicked funny,” she says, “and sarcasm doesn’t read in print.” Momsen has always insisted she’s disinterested in fame — and in what anyone outside of her fans might say about her. “Everything everyone’s ever said about me I’ve already thought. I’m always six steps ahead.” After four seasons on Gossip Girl, she was written out, just as she wanted. She turned away from the tabloids that tracked both her role and her personal life and dove further into the Pretty Reckless. “I stopped doing anything fashion-related, and I stopped doing anything celebrity-driven, because I didn’t want to taint the art I was making,” she says. “I’ve always been super serious about what I do.” Mat Hayward/Getty Images The pivot from child actor to rock musician didn’t come easily. “I always felt I had something to prove, so I lived in this really defensive space for a long time, especially at shows and in press,” she explains. “I would always double down on things people would say. Someone said they thought my eyeshadow was too dark, so I made it fucking blacker.” It’s a look she’s maintained for over a decade. “I’ve had a very strange life up until this point,” she says, putting it mildly. “It hasn’t been typical. It hasn’t been easy. The road to get here was challenging. And that’s not to say there aren’t challenges in front of me constantly. It’s just that I think I’m better equipped to handle them now than I was back in the day.” Momsen says she’s in the best emotional state of her life. “I finally feel [like] myself 100 percent of the time, and I think that’s reflected in the art we’re making.” From that steadier footing, she’s accessing a deeper level of honesty. “There were a lot of things in my life that I didn’t want to deal with. Now nothing’s off the table. The whole record is a giant confession.” For Momsen, that word is especially loaded. Raised Catholic, her music has always been, to some extent, in dialogue with Christianity: the heaven-and-hell absolutism of “Going to Hell,” the invocation of sin and redemption in “Heaven Knows,” the fixation on guilt, punishment and salvation that runs through Death by Rock and Roll. That framework gave her early work its scale and severity. On Dear God, she returns to it with a more ambivalent stance. The album’s title couldn’t be more overt — and its artwork places her in a Catholic school uniform — but Momsen resists reading it strictly through a religious lens. Instead, she frames Dear God in broader, more personal terms, aiming for clarity and connection rather than doctrine. Here, “God” expands beyond a single meaning. “The reason it’s called Dear God is because it’s a plea — it’s a prayer — but that [word] God can mean anything. It’s not literal. It’s dealing with a way grander concept. I just grew up with Christianity, so that’s the imagery I associate with it.” By the time the Pretty Reckless entered the studio at the start of 2023, it had been a couple years since their previous record, Death by Rock and Roll. They had been touring relentlessly, without pause. Momsen ar­rived with a hefty batch of songs to be whittled down. In the studio, they hit a rare stride: the best sessions of their career, each day yielding multiple lightning-in-a-bottle moments. They burned with the same fire that first drove them to form the band. At one point, Momsen called her agent with a clear directive: hold off on touring. “Unless,” she joked, “AC/DC or the Rolling Stones come calling.” After another blistering session, her agent’s name flashed on her phone. “Why the fuck is he calling? I said no more touring.” “Taylor, you’re not going to believe this,” he said. “AC/DC just called. They want to take you on tour.” She laughed it off. “I was like, shut the fuck up, this can’t be real.” A few weeks later, he called again. “Taylor, you won’t believe this, either. The Rolling Stones also called, they want you to open for them in Vegas.” The timing struck her as another call from the uni­verse. “I know I sound like Phoebe from Friends,” she says, “but it’s real.” Ethan Miller/Getty Images True to her word, Momsen took the gigs. She flew from Vegas to Germany, playing with two of the most iconic bands in rock history within the span of a week. Even so, her mind kept circling back to the record. What would happen to the momentum? Would the spark hold? “When things are going so well in the studio, you don’t know if you’re going to get it back again,” she says. “It was a huge gamble.” But each time they re­turned, the momentum was still there. “I think it actu­ally kept it really fresh, because we never had time to sit and get stuck.” It echoed those early years, when Momsen worked multiple jobs while trying to finish a record, moving forward on instinct and necessity. There was noth­ing contrived about the album. It poured out with unusual clarity. “The songs are so full of rawness and honesty,” she says. “It’s like they’ve always existed.” That same pattern is playing out across Mom­sen’s life. Right before her performance with Sound­garden, she did something she had resisted for years: re-recording “Where Are You Christmas?,” the song that first introduced her to the world. The resulting Taylor Momsen’s Pretty Reckless Christmas EP, she says, felt like “a bizarre turn of events.” Fans had been asking for it since she formed the band, and she had always refused. “That was something that I never in a million years thought I would have done.” It was only after a series of losses — including the deaths of Soundgarden’s Chris Cornell, whom the Pretty Reckless had opened for in 2017 on what would become his final tour, and her longtime producer Kato Khandwala — that her perspective began to shift. “It was the first time it clicked in my brain as a pos­sibility,” she says. “Maybe it could be healing for me.” She arranged the song quickly and brought it to the band. They played it once through. “By the end of the song, everyone had big grins on their faces.” Her reunion with Jim Carrey took place in that same spirit. “I was kind of anxious running into Carrey again,” she says. “But reuniting under the umbrella of our love for this band was mind-blowing. It felt like coming home.” Rock roll is the force that brought Momsen here, the framework through which she understands her­self, and the thread that still pulls everything into alignment. For her, there is no final destination. “There is no bottom to rock roll. You will never hit the end of it.”