Don Broco - Nightmare Tripping Review: The Album That Needed Nickelback and Sam Carter in the Same Year
8/10
Five albums in, Don Broco are still refusing to be filed anywhere clean. Nightmare Tripping — out now via Fearless Records — is their heaviest, darkest, most sonically reckless record, and it earns every descriptor. It's also the one where they put Nickelback on the title track, Sam Carter of Architects on "True Believers," and somehow turned both into the most convincing argument for the record rather than the most questionable decisions.
Producer Dan Lancaster, who's been Don Broco's studio anchor for years, doesn't try to smooth out the chaos. He leans into it. Nightmare Tripping feels like an album that was always going to sound like this — like all the genre-hopping and tonal whiplash from their catalog was building toward something with real stakes. The record isn't pretty in the conventional sense. It's twitchy, confrontational, and genuinely unsettling in places. That's the point.
Track by Track
"Cellophane" opens the album like a lit fuse. Jagged riffs, Rob Damiani's vocal performance bouncing between croons and snarls within the same bar, and enough immediate pressure to tell you this isn't Amazing Things 2. It lands.
"Disappear" pivots into something colder. Pulsing rhythms, ghostly textures, a drum and bass-inspired breakdown that drops the floor out. Emotionally it's the most isolating track on the record — which in context is exactly what it needs to be.
"Somersaults" is where the record breathes for a minute before it tightens back down. Mid-album sequencing choice. Smart.
"Nightmare Tripping" (feat. Nickelback) — the one everyone's talking about, and rightfully so. Chad Kroeger and Ryan Peake were brought in after Nickelback saw Don Broco live and reached out. Filmed in a burnt-out LA haunted house and directed by Gordy De St. Jeor with a film-noir aesthetic, the video looks as good as the song sounds. Kroeger's vocal sits under Damiani's in a way that makes both of them sound better. Ryan Peake's guitar solo is the moment where the collaboration stops feeling like a stunt and starts feeling inevitable. Crunchy, swaggering, cinematic. It's the best thing Nickelback have been involved in for a decade and the most unexpected banger on the album.
"Ghost in the Night" is the album's most expansive moment — cinematic force, urgent and desperate in a way that calls back to "One True Prince" without trying to replicate it. One of the record's best.
"True Believers" (feat. Sam Carter) is where the album gets political and refuses to apologize for it. Damiani wrote it in 2024 during the Southport Riots while flipping between Olympic coverage and footage of nationalist violence. He named what he was responding to directly: the rise of the far-right across Europe and the US, politicians and crowds throwing Nazi salutes without consequence, genocide apologists mainstreamed. Carter's screams don't feel like a feature — they feel like the song demanded exactly this voice. The breakdown is crushing.
"Euphoria" is the tonal pivot that keeps the second half from collapsing under its own weight. Funky bassline, seductive aggression, an anthemic chorus that earns the word. Don Broco at their most immediately infectious.
"Pacify Me" and "Swimming Pools" maintain the pressure without the spikes — two tracks that would be highlights on a lesser record but here function as connective tissue. Not filler, but not where the album lives.
"Hype Man" is a late-album burst of energy that sounds exactly like what it should sound like: a band that's been saving something for the back stretch.
"The Corner" closes the record in the most Don Broco way possible — expansive, melodic, more questions than answers. It doesn't try to tie anything off. Nightmare Tripping doesn't resolve. It stops.
The Verdict
Nightmare Tripping can feel like a lot on first listen. The constant pivots between registers — emotional, sonic, tonal — are deliberately disorienting. That's the work. The album rewards patience and repeated listens in a way that most records at this tempo don't bother attempting.
The Nickelback collaboration will get the most attention and deserves it — but "True Believers" is the track that's going to matter longer. Don Broco have made their most purposeful record. They've also made their most chaotic one. Both things are true, and that tension is exactly what makes it worth your time.
8/10
Nightmare Tripping is out now via Fearless Records. Grab it on Amazon.
