Alice Cooper Group Reunites for New Album After 52 Years

The last time the original Alice Cooper Group played together on a full album, they had logged the last of their three straight Top 10 LPs with 1973’s Muscle of Love. In 1975, after one final show the previous year, singer Vincent Furnier legally changed his name to Alice Cooper and began a solo career that yielded another Top 10 album.

The original band, consisting of Cooper, guitarist Michael Bruce, bassist Dennis Dunaway and drummer Neal Smith, reunited at a 1999 tribute for guitarist Glen Buxton, who died in 1997. Songs by the reunited group appeared on Cooper’s 2011 album Welcome 2 My Nightmare, 2017’s Paranormal and 2021’s Detroit Stories, with the latter sparking full-fledged reunion talk, resulting in The Revenge of Alice Cooper.

That album, 52 years after their last one together, extends the musical bedrock of Cooper’s previous LP, 2023’s The Road, one of his most focused and confident works since his mid-’70s prime. The Revenge of Alice Cooper sounds like a homecoming, but just as often it reignites the group’s passion for arena-made heavy rock. (Buxton even appears ghost-like in “What Happened to You” via an unreleased recording.) In their effort to replicate the past, however, some of it can’t help but feel a bit strained.

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Produced by Bob Ezrin, whose association with the band goes back to 1971’s Love It to Death, the album appropriates all the signposts of classic Alice Cooper material — from guitar riffs that immediately set songs’ settings to lyrics that lean darkly toward horror — for a reunion that serves as a victory lap after more than 50 years away. The opening track, “Black Mamba,” begins with 40 seconds of spoken-word scene-laying by Cooper before slinky guitar coils its way throughout the song. The rest of the LP follows suit.

The self-mythologizing “Wild Ones,” “Ballad of Dwight Fry” companion “Kill the Flies,” the psychedelic swirl of “Blood on the Sun” and others evoke the group’s past, either directly or indirectly. Cooper’s late-night shocks can sound tame next to modern-day real horrors; wisely, these occasions are played for smirks rather than scares. Better are the album’s more sincere moments, such as the catchy “Money Screams” (which includes a “Billion Dollar Babies” reprise at the fade-out). In the album’s touching closer, “See You on the Other Side,” Cooper sings, “I know someday we’re gonna play together again.” It’s a fitting end to The Revenge of Alice Cooper, a tribute to the past, Buxton and most of all themselves. After 52 years, they deserve it.