ALBUM REVIEW: Don Broco – ‘Nightmare Tripping’

When Don Broco announced Nightmare Tripping with its Nickelback-featuring title track, you could view it as a desperate decision. For a band who’ve gotten bigger yet less uniquely impactful with each new step, it’s not too much of a surprise. Yet, it was also a headline-grabber above all else. It’s not like Chad Kroeger has much to do on the song; you can barely tell him apart from Rob Damiani’s regular ‘chorus voice’. Instead, it’s more shorthand for Don Broco’s ensconcing into the wider rock landscape that continues to yank out everything fun and distinct about them. Conjecture, yes, but Kroeger doesn’t seem like someone who goes to Nando’s with the lads often, does he?

Even if outgrowth of their earliest lad-rock is expected, it’s been what’s ultimately stymied Don Broco for almost the last decade. You can pinpoint the exact moment when it happened, too, as Technology was front-loaded with its highlights before swiftly transitioning to pure bloat almost exactly halfway. Then came Amazing Things in 2021 and good luck picking out anything worth calling a ‘highlight’ on that. All of it feels like a consequence of Don Broco buying into being a more serious band, and removing the lithe, cocksure attitude that predominantly gave them the edge in the Britrock days. Even if Nightmare Tripping is better than last time overall, it’s still more of the same—a big, fit-to-burst monolith with precious little of what made Don Broco stand out in the first place.

It’s worth noting how the thesis of the album was for the band to make their heaviest album to date, a goal whose nobility is overshadowed by how little wiggle room it’s given. Clearly that’s manifested physically, too, given how Nightmare Tripping plays out. It certainly is their heaviest album, thanks to implacable walls of down-tuned nu-metal guitars deliberately mixed to crush and pummel everything else. It’s antithetical to a band whose defining characteristic was Tom Doyle’s fluid basslines, which now have next to no purchase. They still crop up audibly on a song like Euphoria, but there isn’t a driving force behind them anymore. Naturally, that can bring things to a grinding halt when the likes of Disappear or Pacify Me gallumph along with no tact or agility. ‘Heaviness’ on Nightmare Tripping, therefore, comes at such an expensive price, which Don Broco seldom acknowledge.

The one upside to it is Rob Damiani having more room to scream, which does have some merit. The strangled mathcore portions of the title track would’ve been unthinkable from this band in the mid-2010s, as would the full-on metalcore song True Believers that has Damiani hold his own against Architects’ Sam Carter to a fault. When Nightmare Tripping actually seeks to explore rather than settle for a default ‘heavy’, it can be pretty good. It helps, too, that Don Broco’s lyrical lexicon is simply more developed than a lot of similar bands’, meaning that pretty much every track here has at least a line or turn of phrase to latch onto.

But like the immovable stature of the album itself, the roadblocks that stop Nightmare Tripping from clicking are significant. They’re unqualifiable in some places; if you insist on putting Don Broco next to current-gen nu-metal or alt-metal drawing from the same sources, chances are you’ll find much more inspiration on Nightmare Tripping. Perhaps it’s how, for its perceived seriousness, the great purpose behind it feels so limited. That was fine on Priorities and Automatic, where you only had one or two of these more ponderous numbers like Nerve as an anchor. Here, when that’s taken over as the majority, the clenched jaw with which this vision is executed leaves it starkly more rigid. True Believers is a perfect microcosm—the most aggressive song that Don Broco have ever written, explicitly a socio-political scather, and it’s already been reduced to Sam Carter providing one his much-memed “blegh!”s.

Therefore, having Nickelback on this album—a band who still get disproportionate hate for as predictable as they are, yet give a no-more-effort-than-needed contribution buoyed by what’s around it—almost feels like the inverse of Don Broco themselves. They’re not predictable and they are putting in effort, but struggle to stay afloat and can’t wholly justify the lauding they continue to get. In spots, Nightmare Tripping comes close, but is left so mercilessly shackled between what does and doesn’t work that it’s hard to feel truly satisfied. There’s too much of that original spark continuously whittled down, with the remaining shell bulked out but making few marks in the space it fills. The result, then, is this—not a nightmare; far from a trip.

For fans of: Architects, PRESIDENT, Enter Shikari

‘Nightmare Tripping’ by Don Broco is out now on Fearless Records.

Words by Luke Nuttall