Chris Daughtry has gone over to the dark side. You can see it right on his skin: his arms and shoulders newly blacked out, smothering his previous tattoos under unbroken sleeves of ink. And it can be heard in his newest music, which leans away from his earlier pop-rock radio past toward something both heavier and closer to his adolescent dreams.
The North Carolina singer is on a video call from his hotel room in New Haven, Connecticut, bearded with a shaved head, dressed in a sleeveless white hoodie. It’s a day off during his final run of dates on the road with Creed. His band will be back out on tour with Seether in October.
Back in high school, he idolized Alice in Chains, Nirvana, Soundgarden, and other heroes of the grunge era, as those acts conquered rock radio and MTV. His own namesake band hasn’t always followed their example, even as Daughtry debuted as a platinum-selling act, with a rock sound often guided toward mainstream radio to great chart success. But on Daughtry’s new EP, Shock to the System (Part Two), released September 12 on Big Machine, the music is heavier than ever.
“It’s been a slow progression to getting to this point. This sounds crazy, but I didn’t know I had permission,” the singer says, noting that much of his career was with a major label that encouraged him to focus on a commercial rock sound. Once he left RCA, he says he turned back to the bands he loved as a teen for inspiration.
“Those were the records that made me want to do this to begin with. But I’m like, can we do this as Daughtry?”
Success came early for the singer, who was first discovered by the public as a finalist in 2006 on American Idol, then at a peak in the talent show’s popularity. More significantly, his self-titled debut album that year, under the band name Daughtry, included two Top-10 singles with “It’s Not Over” and “Home.” Both Daughtry and the 2009 follow-up album Leave This Town went platinum.
He enjoyed the success but Daughtry says now that some of the music released over his first 15 years as a recording artist didn’t reflect his true musical interests. On tour this year, some albums are not represented at all in his nightly set lists.
“I think it is a mixed bag,” he says of his early career. “There are certain songs that I had no hand in writing, so I have zero emotional connection to, and I don’t play those songs. And then there’s songs that, regardless of whether it wasn’t as heavy as I would’ve liked it to be, I still respect those songs and what they did for us. And we still play those songs with a smile on our face.”
He now performs the hit single “Home” on solo acoustic, stripping the song to its essence, a form that works with his current state of mind. “The crowd still gets to hear it,” he says, “and it feels like a magical moment.”
While he continues to represent the old songs in concert, his focus is now mostly on his newest music, and Daughtry has begun to see some rewards. From last year’s EP Shock to the System (Part One), the songs “Artificial” and “Pieces” reached the top of Billboard’s Active Rock chart, a first for the band.
Taking creative control of his band’s musical direction is no guarantee that he’ll reach the heights of his inspirations, but the decisions will at least be his. As just one example, until 2021, he’d allowed others to steer the look and content of his music videos, but now asserts a hands-on creative role, after “realizing why all my videos sucked,” he says now with a laugh.
As the group digs into their louder and heavier side, the frontman says some of the band’s early followers have stepped away, while attracting a new generation of fans.
“We knew that we were going to lose a pocket of our audience,” he says of the shift in direction. “I had to be okay with that and kind of rip the Band-Aid off, so to speak. At the end of the day, I had to believe in what we’re doing, and step outside myself and see me from the perspective of the 16-year-old who wanted to do this. Is this the band I wanted to be? And if not, then why the fuck am I not doing that? So that was kind of the impetus of that, and I never looked back.”
Daughtry’s new seven-song EP opens with the dramatic scene-setting piano instrumental “The Seeds,” which leads directly into the pounding “Divided,” built on crushing guitars and beats, and the singer roaring an anthemic chorus: “It’s always been us against the world / We’ve known it from the start / We won’t be torn apart!”
There’s also the anxious “The Day I Die” and the hard-hitting tracks “Terrified” (with the snarling lyric “I can’t stop the beast from coming outta me!”) and “Razor,” a smokier, heavy rocker. Already released ahead of the EP was the emotionally raw single “The Bottom” with lyrics that reflect on his move to take control of his music and career.
“I think everyone has their own personal bottom, whatever that is. I felt like musically I was in this really uninspired, depressed place for a few years. COVID kind of broke me out of it,” Daughtry explains. “It’s basically about climbing out of my own hole and reclaiming my own identity again.”
As in the past, the lyrics draw inspiration from his own personal hurdles and triumphs. “It’s all I really know. Otherwise, I’m just guessing,” he says with a grin.
Both Shock to the System EPs were originally planned as part of a single album, but as the sessions dragged on, Daughtry grew restless about putting some new music into the world. In 2023, the single “Artificial” was finished, a brooding warning of an apocalyptic digital, robotic future as AI increasingly looms over society. He sings, “Plug into the new you, don’t resist / ‘Cause it’s no use, it’s no use / It’s digital warfare / The death of who we are is right here.”
“It was probably one of the first songs we ever put out that had, like, zero hope,” the singer says with a laugh.
The band and label were excited about its prospects, so rather than wait for the full album to be ready, Daughtry split the album project into two EPs. “I was like, I feel like we gotta go with this now,” he says of “Artificial.” “The subject matter is time sensitive. It feels so relevant right now.”
Throughout the band’s life, Daughtry has maintained a foundation with guitarists Josh Steely and Brian Craddock, who have been with the group nearly two decades. The group’s shift toward an increasingly heavy brand of rock comes at a good time, with guitars seemingly reasserting themselves into pop culture, as the likes of Oasis and System of a Down play to full stadiums in the U.S. and around the world.
On the road, the singer has noted a new element in his audiences too. “We’ve noticed more younger people in our crowds and singing the lyrics to even the newer stuff,” he says.
“I feel like young people in general are tired of overproduced, processed, polished music,” Daughtry adds. “There’s this gravitation towards rock because it’s real and it makes them feel something. Especially rock bands live, there’s just this experience and this visceral thing that you can’t really put into words. They walk away feeling like, ‘Man, I just experienced something real.’ There’s a huge hunger for that from young people.”
He says that his twin son and daughter, now 15, share some of the same musical interests he does, and have embraced rock albums from past decades, from Nirvana to Deftones. “I’ve got older kids and I’ve got younger kids, and it’s never crossed paths that way where we’re both into the same stuff,” Daughtry says. “A lot of the stuff that they’re into is stuff that I was into when I was their age.”
By age 16, Daughtry was not just drawn to the likes of Alice in Chains’ Dirt and Soundgarden’s Superunknown, but had become hyper-focused on the role of singer. For him, the heights reached by vocalists like Chris Cornell and Tool’s Maynard James Keenan were something he wanted to reach for too.
By the time he was 20, he was working as a mechanic. Five years later, with a wife and kids at home, he fully made the leap into life as a rock singer, first in front of a national TV audience. Daughtry was a real recording artist soon after. He still knows where he wants to end up.
“I’m reaching, I’m reaching, I’m reaching—Cornell, Maynard, those guys were gods to me and still are in the world of rock vocals,” he says. “They still challenge me. Those records still get me excited and want me to get better.”
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