Rising stars Dirty Honey announce third album Catch My Butterfly. "We've made mistakes, gotten over past regrets, lived more, and become better songwriters"

Los Angeles rock band Dirty Honey are three albums deep now, and if the ambition behind Catch My Butterfly is anything to go by, they are only just getting started.

The follow-up to 2023's Can't Find the Brakes lands on 15 January via Dirt Records, and the band have already put two songs out into the world: the thumping "Lights Out" and the more reflective "Butterfly." First impressions suggest this is a band pushing outward, not coasting.

What We Are Actually Getting

Fourteen tracks. That is a proper album, not some stripped-back eight-song statement. The full tracklist runs from opener "Lights Out" through to closer "I Should've Known," with stops at "Wanderlust," "American Lies," and "Poison" along the way. There is genuine range in those titles alone, and the two singles already confirm the band are not working from a single template.

Guitarist John Notto is clearly pleased with how "Lights Out" came together. "It's one of those rare times when I got the solo right on the demo," he says. That kind of confidence in a first take tends to produce something you can feel. But he is also quick to flag it is only one corner of what the record offers: "There's so much more."

"Butterfly" is the more interesting of the two singles, frankly. Frontman Marc LaBelle wrote it from the perspective of a family member watching someone they love disappear into addiction, that specific, suffocating anxiety of not knowing whether a person is alive at any given moment. "If you don't get high, there's no way that you're going to catch this person who is so beautiful in your eyes, but so broken at the same time," he says. That is a heavy thing to put into a rock song, and the fact they have tried says something about where the band are as writers.

The Producer and the Weight of a Third Album

Catch My Butterfly was produced by John Feldman, frontman of Goldfinger, who has previously worked with Blink-182, Biffy Clyro, The Struts, Yungblud, and Avril Lavigne among others. That is a producer who knows how to hold a big sound together without letting it collapse into noise.

LaBelle's quote about the record lands harder than most album press releases manage: "Any band has to really survive to make a third record. We've made mistakes in the studio, gotten over past regrets, lived more, and become better songwriters. All of those things snowballed into Catch My Butterfly." He is right. Getting to a third album is genuinely hard, and the ones that make it this far with something to say are worth paying attention to.

Bassist Justin Smolian puts it more directly: "We're no one-trick pony." Bold claim, but two singles in, it does not feel like empty talk.

Dirty Honey have been road-hardened by tours alongside Guns N' Roses, The Who, Kiss, the Black Crowes, and Rival Sons. This is not a band who have been coddled. They have earned the right to make a record that reaches.

We will know more when the full album lands in January. For now, go and listen to "Butterfly." It is the one that tells you who they actually are.