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 third album Break the Spell, it seemed like they were on the cusp of mainstream superstardom. In order to seal the deal, they decided to take things even further and fully lean into contemporary synth-pop on fourth effort Baptized.

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 materialistic gloss, and the album can’t shake the feeling of being a deliberately manufactured, chart-facing recalibration rather than a natural evolution of their sound.

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 themselves, opting instead for some 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.

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 absolutely soars, and a genuinely pleasing vocal performance. It was released as the lead single, returning the band to the Billboard Hot 100 and briefly charting in the UK (peak No. 80).

The album also features an interesting shift in vocal style, as Chris Daughtry trading his usual wounded growl for a sombre, story-led lyrical delivery.

This was done in order to accomodate the change in musical direction, and there are moments where the American Idol alumni finds great success with it. Tracks such as Broken Arrows and Witness — both of which demonstrate just how effective he can be without the old crunch — serve as proof that the issue here isn’t “pop”, but rather how heavily the record 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 some of the band’s weaker lyrical arrangements.

On earlier records, even middling moments could be carried by sheer power — big drums, thick guitars, and a vocal delivered like it had something to prove. But when the surfaces have been smoothed and the edges are considerably softer, cheesy lines and misfiring hooks are left with nowhere to hide.

You need look no further than the title track’s cringe-inducing“Let me drown in your honey, honey.”

Furthermore, the absence of Daughtry’s trademark guitar work sits over the record like a black hole — almost as if these tracks were written as rock songs and then forced into a different template. The new sonic palette does not have the weight to compensate, making Baptized feel less like evolution and more like dilution.

That’s why songs like Traitor feel smaller than they want to be: the “hater/traitor” line landing like an advertising slogan rather than a tale of bitter betrayal. This is driven home even further by second single Battleships, with a chorus that really does say “boom-boo-boom-boom-boo-boom-boom-boom, boom-boo-boom-boom-boo-boom” — as if the placeholder lyric made it all the way to the final mix.

Still Got It

Just when Baptized starts to feel like it’s drifting out of control, Daughtry deliver a stone-wall classic.

Long Live Rock & Roll is three minutes of pure momentum — sure, even if it is hard to see past the irony of a song that reminisces about the glory days of rock n’ roll arriving in the form of a country/pop singalong from a band who have put so much effort into trying to escape their beloved genre.

Still, it works.

The chorus is catchier than it has any right to be, 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 Live Through This (spoiler; he didn’t) gives the track a personality that the rest of the record sorely lacks.

If more of Baptized was like this, 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 the album’s release, frontman Chris Daughtry has been far less charitable about the album.

Despite framing it as a deliberate creative shake-up at the time — a “musical rebirth” of sorts — he has since told a very different story about the sudden pop pivot.

In his words, Baptized’s overly glossy finish was a result of RCA wanting Daughtry to chase a narrower version of what had worked in the past, using their leverage to demand they lean wholly into the chart-friendly sound of previous hits, such as Home. The band now operate outside the major-label machine, and Daughtry describes the feeling of finally having full creative autonomy as a major factor in his decision.

That doesn’t retroactively erase its highlights, of course, but it does go a long way to explain why Baptized feels like a pivot made at the band rather than by the band.

Daughtry – Baptized (2013)

Baptized is too well-made and Daughtry are too skilled at penning memorable choruses for it to be classed as a disaster.

However, 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 their first three records gets lost in translation.

Interestingly, their old touring buddies Bon Jovi faced similar backlash when they chased 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.