This summer, the original Alice Cooper Group will release their first new album in over five decades. But while you’re waiting for July’s The Revenge of Alice Cooper, you can piece together a pretty cool album’s worth of songs the four surviving members have made together in the last 14 years.
The Alice Cooper Group was formed in 1968 by singer Alice Cooper, lead guitarist Glen Buxton, guitarist / keyboardist Michael Bruce, bassist Dennis Dunaway and drummer Neil Smith.
After releasing masterful albums such as 1972’s School’s Out and 1973’s Billion Dollar Babies, the group amicably split up in 1974. Beginning with 1975’s Welcome to My Nightmare, Cooper kept performing under the same name as a solo act.
But this wasn’t your typical mudslinging split. “When bands break up, they generally hate each other, and they don’t want to talk to each other,” the singer explained in 2021. “We didn’t hate each other at all, we actually loved each other.”
Two years after Buxton’s 1997 death, the surviving group members performed together for the first time at a show in his honor. They’ve made a handful of joint appearances since, most notably for a 2015 in-store that was later released as Live From the Astroturf, Alice Cooper.
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Starting with 2011’s Welcome 2 My Nightmare, Dunaway, Bruce and Smith also began co-writing and performing on songs from Cooper’s solo albums.
“Those guys have got an open invitation at all times, and they know it, to write songs and submit songs,” Cooper told UCR contributor Gary Graff in the book Alice Cooper @ 75. “And when they do submit songs I kind of insist on it being the entire band playing it live in the studio. If we’re gonna do an original Alice song, I want it to sound like the original band… it has a darker sound, and a heavier sound. It’s a very different personality, and I even sing differently when I sing with those guys.”
Here’s 11 songs the original Alice Cooper Group have co-written and / or recorded together since 2011:
From Welcome 2 My Nightmare (2011): “A Runaway Train,” “I’ll Bite Your Face Off” and “When Hell Comes Home.”
Shortly after reuniting to accept their 2011 induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the surviving Alice Cooper Group members teamed up for three songs on Welcome 2 My Nightmare, a sequel to Cooper’s 1975 solo debut Welcome to My Nightmare. They also each co-wrote one of the songs. “I’ll Bite Your Face Off” was the album’s lead single, and “A Runaway Train” features smoking lead guitar work from country star (and future Eagle) Vince Gill.
Hear the Alice Cooper Group Perform ‘A Runaway Train’
Hear the Alice Cooper Group Perform ‘I’ll Bite Your Face Off’
Hear the Alice Cooper Group Perform ‘When Hell Comes Home’
From Paranormal (2017): “Fireball,” “Rats,” “The Sound of A,” “Genuine American Girl” and “You and All of Your Friends”
Released six years after Welcome 2 My Nightmare – Cooper had spent some time touring and recording with Aerosmith’s Joe Perry in the Hollywood Vampires – 2017’s Paranormal featured even more involvement from members of the original Alice Cooper group.
Cooper gives full credit to Dunaway for one of the album’s best songs: “‘Fireball’ is a Dennis song, pure Dennis song… It’s a total driving song it just never stops, just got this freight train of a sound going through it,” the singer explained in a 2017 video, while admitting that the Twilight Zone-styled twist ending was his work. “That’s Dennis on bass, Neil on drums, it’s great to have the original band play on those songs.”
The album also features “The Sound of A,” a song Cooper wrote in the late ’60s and eventually completely forgot. Dunaway says it was the first complete song Cooper ever wrote by himself.
Hear the Alice Cooper Group Perform ‘Fireball’
Hear ‘Rats’
Hear ‘The Sound of A’
Hear the Alice Cooper Group Perform ‘Genuine American Girl’
Hear the Alice Cooper Group Perform ‘You and All of Your Friends’
From Detroit Stories (2021): “Social Debris,” “I Hate You” and “Drunk and in Love”
Cooper paid tribute to his hometown on 2021’s Detroit Stories, which made the inclusion of the original group members a no-brainer. “When we started doing this I was like, ‘I can definitely include the original band – we broke out of Detroit and, as far as we were concerned, we were a Detroit band,'” Cooper told Graff. “When I got together with the guys, it was effortless. I went, ‘Let’s just write an Alice Cooper song,’ and the first thing that came up was ‘Social Debris,” which could have been on Love it to Death or Killer.”
Hear the Alice Cooper Group Perform ‘Social Debris’
Hear the Alice Cooper Group Perform ‘I Hate You’
Hear the Alice Cooper Group Perform ‘Drunk and in Love’
