Nine Buckcherry albums you should listen to and one to avoid

Buckcherry group portrait — (Image credit: Annamaria Disanto/WireImage)

Throwbacks. Relics. Dinosaurs. When they broke through in 1999, Buckcherry were arguably all of these things – but for most fans, that was the whole appeal. At a time when the scene was shifting gears between Britrock’s fag-end, the stragglers of post-grunge and nu metal’s jock-ready bovine bellow – or else, God help us, the NME-concocted ‘new acoustic movement’ – sleaze-talkin’ Californians Buckcherry set the controls for the sticky pleasures of the Sunset Strip circa ’87, offered a slug on a bottle and bundled you into the best party in town.

It all turned on the feral charisma of frontman Josh Todd, a serpentine performer with a hoarse holler, whose stage presence made everyone else look like a block of wood (it figures that he was briefly in the frame to front a proto-Velvet Revolver until Slash pulled the plug). Good thing Buckcherry had him, because no one less magnetic could have sold these non-PC headbangers, the singer’s charm papering over lyrics that already felt like a guilty pleasure back in the noughties (‘Hey, you’re a crazy bitch, but you fuck so good I’m on top of it’ ran the chorus of their signature hit).

On the flipside, Buckcherry could spin a power ballad like few of their peers, and some of the best moments of their sweat-slicked show came when Todd dialled it down to drop a song like Sorry or For The Movies.

“All of my favourite rock records had peaks and valleys,” the singer reasoned, talking to Classic Rock. “You had rockers, mid-tempo songs and ballads. It’s nice to rock people out then bring them down with that human emotion that a ballad brings out. I’ve seen some big, giant, hard, tattooed motherfuckers singing Sorry.”

It’s worth acknowledging that some quarters of the rock community truly despise Buckcherry, and the Californian band have probably weathered more media venom spat in their direction than any contemporary act bar Nickelback or Creed (even Todd recognises their “black sheep” status). But the band’s survival through the past quarter-century-plus – albeit with the singer as the sole constant member – speaks of the enduring quality of their catalogue and the vanishing rarity of their hedonistic vibe on the modern scene.

“We didn’t fit into any of it,” Todd shrugged in our most recent interview. “But when you hear a Buckcherry song, you know it’s us.”

Buckcherry (Dreamworks, 1999)

A band out of time? Perhaps. But having cleaned up from the narcotic car crash of his early band Slamhound, Todd was finally ready to get down to business on Buckcherry’s undeniably good debut. From the naked painted woman on the sleeve art, it was snake-hipped hedonism all the way, with melodic bangers like Lit Up, Get Back and Drink The Water lobbing bottles through the windows of the staid turn-of-the-millennium music scene.

Against the odds and the cultural headwinds, Buckcherry showed us an alternative vision of what post-millennium rock‘n’roll could be. It didn’t quite work out that way, but this opener still thrills.

15 (Universal Japan/Eleven Seven, 2005)

Buckcherry had gone gold, but four long years after 2001’s Time Bomb stiffed, no US label would sit down with the band. 15 only got made thanks to an advance from Universal Japan (“Thank god for the Japanese”) and the faith of the band’s manager, Allen Kovac, who started Eleven Seven Music just to give his charges a shop window.

Perhaps hearing the time bell toll at the last-chance saloon, Todd rose to the occasion with anthems both hard (Crazy Bitch) and soft (Sorry, Everything) and – for once – caught the zeitgeist as MySpace spread the word. “Everybody wanted to be our friends,” he recalled of the unlikely rebirth.

Confessions (Century Media/Eleven Seven, 2013)

The closest Buckcherry ever came to a concept album, Confessions pairs its loose narrative – the bulk of the songs are named after the Seven Deadly Sins, with a few elements like Air and Water thrown in for good measure – with Todd’s most starkly personal lyrics.

There’s no doubting the authentic pain behind ballads like Sloth (written about the day when a 10-year-old Todd came home to learn of his father’s suicide). But casual fans should stick to the heavy fuel, with Gluttony, Wrath and Lust perfect for soundtracking the kind of activities you’ll need to declare in the confession box.

Hellbound (Earache, 2021)

“Have Buckcherry just released the party album of 2021?” mused the late, great Malcolm Dome in one of his final reviews, and the notion didn’t seem so outlandish once you’d spent the night carousing with Todd’s crew.

While other bands tiptoed their way out of lockdown, Hellbound tore from the blocks with Minor Threat tribute number 54321, and So Hott, producer Marti Frederiksen honing their sound to emphasise the teeth and sinew. Stick around for the Train Kept A Rollin’ vibes of Gun and the laid-back Wasting No More Time, late-period guitarist Billy Rowe tapping the band’s latent blues DNA.

Vol. 10 (Earache, 2023)

Older and wiser – but still nursing “a lot of turbulence inside my head” – Todd’s band of brothers ran the gamut on this milestone album, straying from Feels Like Love’s haunted balladry to the Queen-style harmony fanfare that opens With You.

Full marks for variety, but ultimately Buckcherry were still most potent when they came out swinging, as on the breakneck Keep On Fighting (a clap-back to Todd’s school bullies) and Good Time (check out the accompanying video, in which a house party devolves into a boozy zombie apocalypse). If only other tenth albums had this much lead in their pencils.

Roar Like Thunder (Earache, 2025)

It was hard to fault Todd’s mission statement as the now veteran band approached their latest album in Nashville (“The only stipulation was: ‘Let’s fucking rock. No fucking ballads, no fucking covers.’”).

The greats were duly saluted – Steven Tyler’s louche lip on I Go Boom, the right hand of Malcolm Young on Come On, even a Wonderwall-esque jangle-sneer on Hello Goodbye – while the lyrics were heavy on the petting (with Talkin’ Bout Sex only the foreplay). We’d heard it all before, of course we had, but Buckcherry can still do it with laser conviction and zinging earworms by the handful.

All Night Long (Eleven Seven/Atlantic, 2010)

The fact that All Night Long’s title track – which was perhaps Buckcherry’s most naked tribute yet to the Young brothers– soundtracked WrestleMania XXVII suggested that we should not come to this fifth album expecting subtlety.

The band had read the room astutely: after 2008’s downbeat Black Butterfly, the hard-core fans demanded party anthems, and on All Night Long they got them in spades, with Todd pulling out his best sneer ‘n’ strut on Never Say Never, Our World and the on-the-nose It’s A Party. Cynics would inevitably say it’s all just a circling of the wagons, but who cared when the ride was this much fun?

Warpaint (Century Media, 2019)

Two decades on from their Buckcherry debut, Todd found himself in the trenches (original guitarist and co-writer Keith Nelson had tapped out in 2017, and was replaced by Kevin Roentgen, with Sean Winchester on the drum stool).

This untested outfit proved louder than war (The Vacuum was a close cousin of Rage Against The Machine’s Bombtrack), and surprisingly groovy too (try the rootsy chug of Right Now). Elsewhere, a cover of Nine Inch Nails’ Head Like A Hole suggested that Buckcherry wanted to hang with the cool kids, but even then they couldn’t resist making this angst anthem sound like a keg party

Time Bomb (Dreamworks, 2001)

‘Bomb’ was the word: Buckcherry’s second album killed the momentum of their gold-selling debut and dropped them into a black hole for three years. Listen without context, though, and it’s difficult to see why. True, the songs on this album are sufficiently lairy, leery and nihilistic to smoke off certain listeners (‘Life ain’t nuthin’ but bitches and money’ Todd sings on the title track).

Time Bomb is a damn decent record, kicking our teeth in with ‘g’-droppin’ burners like Ridin’ and Slammin’, while countering the almost-toosleazy moments (Porno Star) with the pure piano chime of hidden track Open My Eyes. Give it another try.

...and one to avoid

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Rock 'N' Roll (F-Bomb/Century Media, 2015)

Rock 'N' Roll isn’t actually a bad album, it’s just boring. To their credit, Buckcherry never made a real dud, but a decade or so down the line, everything about Rock ‘N’ Roll just feels a little forgettable, from the none-more-generic title onward.

Clocking in at just 36 minutes, it’s the shortest record in the band’s catalogue, but even so, many of the tracks – little more than route-one placeholders that come and go with no aftertaste – smack of filler. There are bright spots, though: openers Bring It On Back and Tight Pants get the blood pumping, at least. But life is too short to waste on third-tier Buckcherry when there’s far better out there.

Henry Yates has been a freelance journalist since 2002 and written about music for titles including The Guardian, The Telegraph, NME, Classic Rock, Guitarist, Total Guitar and Metal Hammer. He is the author of Walter Trout's official biography, Rescued From Reality, a music pundit on Times Radio and BBC TV, and an interviewer who has spoken to Brian May, Jimmy Page, Ozzy Osbourne, Ronnie Wood, Dave Grohl, Marilyn Manson, Kiefer Sutherland and many more.