Extreme return after 15-year absence with showboating and triumphant new album

Six is Extreme's first new material since 2008's Saudades de Rock

Extreme: Six album artwork
(Image: © Ear Music)

You can trust Louder Our experienced team has worked for some of the biggest brands in music. From testing headphones to reviewing albums, our experts aim to create reviews you can trust. Find out more about how we review.

With a work ethic that makes 80s Def Leppard look diligent, Extreme have, by their own admission, been working on Six since around 2015. Admittedly, Rhianna has been keeping guitarist Nuno Bettencourt busy in her live band, but the rest of them might have been drywalling for all I know. 

It’s not clear which songs from those initial sessions have made it onto Six, but apart from the occasional slip – Mask, Beautiful Girls – this is a showboating and triumphant return. 

It's less funk out, more crunching, brightly produced hard rock, matched with some very cleverly arranged vocal parts, that veers between pop and metal but never sounds misplaced. 

They rattle – the excellent X Out, the Velvet Revolver-like Banshee – and hum on tracks like the delicate Hurricane and the classic pop-ballad twist of Other Side Of The Rainbow. Don’t leave it so long next time

Philip Wilding

Philip Wilding is a novelist, journalist, scriptwriter, biographer and radio producer. As a young journalist he criss-crossed most of the United States with bands like Motley Crue, Kiss and Poison (think the Almost Famous movie but with more hairspray). More latterly, he’s sat down to chat with bands like the slightly more erudite Manic Street Preachers, Afghan Whigs, Rush and Marillion.