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.

Daughtry’s debut turned them into a mid-2000s rock powerhouse, so Leave This Town doesn’t arrive with reinvention on its mind. Instead, it arrives with a very clear brief: do it again. That means plenty more big choruses, heavy polish, and maximum radio appeal reach — and for long stretches, it succeeds.

A Proper Band Album

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

Unbeknownst to most, the 2006 debut was built as a Chris Daughtry solo project, recorded with the help some of the world’s finest session musicians (Phil X, Josh Freese, and more). The touring line-up would then unite as a fully fledged band after the fact.

Leave This Town marks the moment where this newly created five-piece collective begins creating a musical identity of its own, not just contributing to the live show.

Of course, talismanic frontman Chris Daughtry still dominates the process — and rightly so. He possesses an unusually adept instinct for chorus-driven rock, 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 last.

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 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 drive into this new “big modern rock” lane, they sound completely at home.

The standout run is there for all to see, as 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 in the memory.

Stacks Of Material To Choose From

While the previous record drew heavily from Chris Daughtry’s solo songwriting skills, Leave This Town features several interesting collaborations.

Guests 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 far 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 sheer accumulation.

Because where his debut used ballads as breathing space, Leave This Town often does the opposite; it spaces out the rockers and clusters too many sombre, reflective 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 — perhaps swapping a couple of the softer cuts for the punchier B-side material including Traffic Light, Get Me Through, or Back Again — would have given the best ballads more room to operate, and helped them to 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 band 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 it was quickly followed by No Surprise, which peaked much higher 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 to reach the Billboard Hot 100 so far — an incredble feat for a band only two albums deep into their career.

Daughtry – Leave This Town

As far as second albums go, Leave This Town manages to tick all of the right boxes. It might not push their sound forward in any dramatic way, but it refines the formula that worked well last time.

It’s a move that paid off, too, with the record debuting at No. 1 on the coveted Billboard 200.

Futhermore, when we consider the commercial success of recent albums from the likes of Bon Jovi, AC/DC and Guns N’ Roses, coupled with the dissipation of public interest in the nu-metal scene that has dominated the landscape since the turn of the millennium, the stage may be set for traditional hard rock to return to it’s stadium-sized roots — and if that really is the case, then there’s enough quality within Leave This Town to suggest that Daughtry are well-equipped to become “the choice of a new generation” of mainstream rock listeners.