Daughtry – Leave This Town (2009) Review

Some will call this playing it safe. Others will call it standing firm.

Either way, it’s easy to understand the logic.

The debut turned Daughtry into a mid-2000s rock powerhouse, so Leave This Town doesn’t arrive with reinvention on its mind. It arrives with a clearer brief: do the same job again — big choruses, heavy polish, maximum radio reach — and do it without sounding like a copy of a copy.

For long stretches, it succeeds.

A Proper Band Album

This is the first Daughtry record that really deserves to be called a band album.

The 2006 debut was built as a Chris Daughtry-led studio project, with the touring line-up formalised after the fact. Leave This Town marks the point where the five-piece identity becomes part of the writing and the framing, not just the live show.

Of course, Chris still dominates the centre of the record — and rightly so.

He has an unusually reliable instinct for chorus-driven rock with mass appeal, and a vocal style that sells sincerity without sounding like it’s auditioning for it. But the broader point lands: this album feels less like “solo artist plus supporting cast” and more like a unit built to sustain momentum.

“We’ve tried to make it known that this isn’t just me…”

– Chris Daughtry

Straight-Ahead Rock Done Right

Album opener You Don’t Belong is a smart tone-setter: hard-driving, thick in the low end, and confident enough to open the record without the safety net of an obvious chorus-first single.

The bigger story, though, is the album’s emotional calibration.

Compared to its predecessor, Leave This Town dials down the darker, angrier streak and leans harder into clean, stadium-sized uplift. That shift could be read as a commercial move — but it also suits the band’s strengths. When Daughtry lean into this new “big modern rock” lane, they sound completely at home.

The standout run is obvious: Ghost of Me, Every Time You Turn Around, and No Surprise all do the thing they’re designed to do — hit fast, hit clean, and stick.

Stacks Of Material To Choose From

Unlike the Daughtry-centric debut, the writing sessions for Leave This Town featured several interesting collaborations.

Outside writers included Chad Kroeger (Nickelback), Richard Marx, Ryan Tedder (One Republic), and Adam Gontier (Three Days Grace).

Sadly, most of the finalised tracks from these sessions were left on the cutting room floor, with the band deciding to bank on their own material instead — although a handful of them eventually found a home on Leave This Town: The B-Sides (and Tour/Deluxe editions) released the following year.

"Of all the things I still remember,
Summer's never looked the same."

SEPTEMBER

Too Much Of A Good Thing?

Leave This Town falls short by leaning too heavily into the softer, mid-tempo lane.

There’s no denying Chris Daughtry can sell this material. September and Open Up Your Eyes in particular show how effective he can be when the writing earns the weight, and his bruised, earnest delivery is instantly more relatable than that of his post-grunge rivals (Nickelback, Chevelle, Fuel).

The issue is accumulation. Where the debut used ballads as breathing space, Leave This Town often does the opposite; it spaces out the rockers and clusters too many “emotional” tracks into the same stretch of road. And despite the quality on show, we must concur that there’s only so many times your heartstrings can be tugged and your guts can be wrenched before the emotional register begins to blur.

A tighter version of this album — swapping a couple of the softer cuts for the punchier B-side material such as Traffic Light, Get Me Through, or Back Again — would have given the best ballads more room to breathe, and hit harder when they arrive.

"But as they laid him in the ground,
Her heart would sing without a sound."

OPEN YOUR EYES

Solidifying Their Success

Commercially, the record was a success.

It could not replicate the record-breaking album which arrived two years earlier, but it solidified Daughtry’s position as a legitimate act at a time when there was a demand — and a noticeable gap in the market — for straight-ahead rock music.

Crunching lead single You Don’t Belong received significant airplay after featuring heavily on ESPN. The rocker scraped into the Billboard Hot 100 (just!), and was quickly followed by No Surprise, which peaked at No. 15.

Later that year, third single Life After You reached No. 38 and spent an impressive 62 weeks on Billboard’s Rock Digital Songs chart, before standout track September eventually rounded off the proceedings by becoming Daughtry’s ninth single so far to reach the Billboard Hot 100 — an incredble feat for a band only two albums into their career.

Daughtry – Leave This Town

As far as second albums go, Leave This Town ticks the boxes.

It doesn’t push the sound forward in any dramatic way, but it refines the formula that worked well last time.

Furthermore, when we consider the success of recent albums by the likes of AC/DC, Bon Jovi, and Guns N’ Roses, in addition to the collapse of the nu-metal scene, the stage may well be set for hard rock to return to it’s stadium-sized roots.

If that is indeed the case, then the quality of the material on Leave This Town — and the fact that it debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 — is enough to suggest that Daughtry are well-equipped to become “the choice of a new generation” of rock music listeners.