Daughtry – Baptized (2013) Review

If Baptized teaches one valuable lesson, it’s that you can have too much of a good thing.

After Daughtry dialled down the post-grunge weight in favour of bigger, Bon Jovi-sized choruses on Break the Spell, the band went a step further: Baptized is a deliberate pivot into the mainstream with strong synth-pop influence.

That decision isn’t automatically a crime — the real problem is the execution.

Because where its predecessor made sure to retain enough bite to balance accessibility with legitimacy, Baptized swaps impact for pure gloss, and the album can’t shake the feeling of a manufactured, chart-facing recalibration rather than a natural evolution.

The Pop Pivot

Baptized is the first Daughtry album that doesn’t feel like a band tightening its identity.

Instead of writing with the five-piece unit and leaning on the Howard Benson engine that powered the first three records, the frontman builds this album through one-to-one sessions with a rotating cast of pop-leaning collaborators (Martin Johnson, Rock Mafia, Scott Stevens, Toby Gad and others).

The result is slicker and more modular — bright choruses, synth-pop touches, and a smoother vocal approach that often trades punch for sheen.

Even the presentation underlines the shift. It’s the first cover in the catalogue that doesn’t feature the band, opting instead for abstract floral photography credited to José Enrique Montes Hernandez — a neat visual cue that you’re about to hear a softer palette and a different set of priorities

“I’ve wanted to make a pop record for a while. Hearing Bon Jovi‘s Lost Highway made me think, “If a band that huge can change, so can we!” It’s not like we’re gonna start releasing dance music (laughs), but we’ve certainly added elements of pop to our sound.”

– Chris Daughtry

Where It Really Works

Even in pop mode, Chris Daughtry remains a gifted songwriter, and the album does contain genuine highs.

Waiting for Superman is the clearest example: a well-built rhythm bed, a chorus that really does soar, and a vocal that sells uplift without forcing it. It was released as the lead single, and it returned the band to the Billboard Hot 100 — while also briefly charting in the UK (peak No. 80).

There’s also an impressive vocal adjustment across the record to accomodate the change in musical direction. The American Idol alumni swaps out his trademark wounded growl for a more sombre, story-led delivery — a change that can suit him when the material earns it.

You’ll hear this on standout tracks like Broken Arrows and Witness — both of which demonstrate how effective he can be without the old crunch, and serve as proof that the issue isn’t “pop” as a concept, but how heavily the album commits to it.

"I just need you to see past,
The worst parts of me."

BROKEN ARROWS

Where It Falls Flat

Unfortunately, Baptized’s pop gloss exposes the writing when it isn’t quite there.

On the earlier records, even middling moments could be carried by crunch — big drums, thick guitars, and a vocal delivered like it had something to prove. Here, the surfaces are smoother and the edges are softer, which means weaker lines and lighter hooks have nowhere to hide.

See “Let me drown in your honey, honey” (from the title track) for a prime example.

When the hooks arrive, Baptized can be genuinely effective. When they don’t, the album’s new palette doesn’t have the weight to compensate — and the pivot starts to feel less like evolution and more like dilution.

That’s why tracks like Traitor feel smaller than they want to be: the “hater/traitor” line lands like a slogan rather than a thought, and the production sheen only draws more attention to it. And Battleships has one of the album’s most baffling choices — a chorus that reduces the whole track to its “boom-boom” motif, as if the placeholder lyric made it to the final mix.

Still Got It

Just when Baptized starts to feel like it’s drifting too far from its own identity, Daughtry pull it back with a stone-wall standout: Long Live Rock & Roll.

It’s three-and-a-half minutes of pure singalong momentum — catchier than it has any right to be — even if the irony is hard to miss. A song reminiscing about the glory of rock ’n’ roll arrives as a pop/country stompalong from a band spending most of this album trying not to sound like a rock band.

Still, it works. The chorus lands, and hearing Daughtry ponder whether Guns N’ Roses were better than Mötley Crue (spoiler; they were) or whether Kurt Cobain really wrote the songs on Hole’s breakthrough album Live Through This (spoiler; he didn’t) give the track a personality the album sometimes smoothes away in the mix.

If more of Baptized hit this level, we’d be having a very different conversation.

"We still can't believe Van Halen,
Turned into Van Hagar."

LONG LIVE ROCK & ROLL

In Retrospect

In the years since Baptized, Chris Daughtry has been far less charitable about the album.

Back in 2013, he framed the pop lean as a deliberate creative shake-up — a “musical rebirth” for the band.

Later interviews tell a different story.

Since stepping away from the major-label system, he’s spoken more openly about label pressure — the sense that RCA wanted Daughtry to chase a narrower version of “what works” by leaning wholly into the chart-friendly sound of songs like Home. He has since described finally having full creative autonomy only after leaving that structure behind; which reframes Baptized less as an organic stylistic leap and more as a record shaped by outside expectations.

It doesn’t retroactively erase the highlights — but it does explain why this album often feels like a pivot made at the band rather than by them.

“The label wanted us to make a pop album two years earlier, but I had already written Break The Spell, so we stuck to our guns. They got payback by refusing to help us promote what I felt was our best record so far, and by the time Baptized came around we felt we’d been backed into a corner.”

– Chris Daughtry

Daughtry – Baptized (2013)

Baptized isn’t a disaster — it’s too well-made, and Daughtry are too good at choruses for it to be.

But it is a backward step in the context of what came before.

The highs (Waiting for Superman, Broken Arrows, Long Live Rock & Roll) prove the band could have made a pop-leaning album that still felt like a Daughtry record. Too often, though, the songs are smoothed into sameness, and the identity that carried the first three records gets lost in translation.

Interestingly, Daughtry’s touring buddies Bon Jovi faced similar backlash when they pursued pop on the disappointingly edgeless What About Now, which was released just six months before Baptized — maybe there was just something in the water circa 2013.