Sam Cieri has spent years writing like a man trying to talk himself into staying soft. The heartbreak ballads. The late-night confessionals. The raspy, theater-trained roar that made an Attempt at Romantic feel like a diary you were never supposed to overhear. That version of Nicotine Dolls built a real audience. It also, by Cieri’s own admission, started to feel like a costume.
The new single, “Enemy,” is the sound of that costume coming off.
Released August 28 as the first look at the band’s self-titled sophomore album — due October 23 via BMG — “Enemy” is a straight-ahead rock song with teeth. Blistering riffs. No apology. No request for understanding. Cieri has said the track came from being blamed by one of his closest friends for choices that friend made and then watched detonate his own life. “I’d never written a f*ck-you song before, but that’s exactly what it is,” he said. “A lot of this record was about confronting things I’d allowed myself to become a victim to, and finally calling them out.”
That quote is the whole record in miniature. Nicotine Dolls are not asking to be liked this time. They are drawing a line.
Cieri has been clear about the title. After years of grinding — subway busking in New York, a lead in the Tony-winning Once, six jobs at a stretch to keep the band alive — the lineup shifted. Guitarist John Newsome came in. Drummer Abel Tabares stayed. The band even finished another album after 2025’s an Attempt at Romantic, then shelved it. Cieri realized he had been writing what he thought people wanted instead of the music that first made him fall for rock and roll.
“I’d always wanted to make a record like the one we ended up with, but never had the right band to pull it off,” he said. “Somehow, everything came together and it felt like magic. That’s why it’s self-titled. To me, it’s the first real Nicotine Dolls record.”
He also said he cried when they finished it. That is not marketing copy. That is a frontman who spent a decade building a brand on vulnerability finally hearing the band he always heard in his head.
Cieri co-produced the 12-track album in Nashville with Marti Frederiksen, the writer-producer whose credits include Aerosmith and Ozzy Osbourne. Desmond Child also appears in the writing credits, including on “Here To California,” a song that began life as “Waiting For California” — a plea to save a sinking relationship by running west — and got rewritten into an anthem about moving forward instead of circling the wreckage.
Early descriptions of the record point to fuzzed-out swagger on “Gimme Sympathy,” simmering defiance on “To the Wolves,” and groove-heavy frustration on “Little Games.” Newsome reportedly tore through one solo with bleeding fingers. That is the energy this lineup is chasing: not the cinematic pop-rock of the last cycle, but the reckless feeling Cieri remembered from being a teenager with a guitar.
The circulating track list runs:
- Wild
- Gimme Sympathy
- Here To California
- To the Wolves
- Drive Away
- Little Games
- Punch Drunk Lovin’
- I’m Right Here
- Wanted You to Know
- Going Numb
- Enemy
- Just Enough
“Wild” and “Just Enough” have already been living in the live set. Hearing them locked next to “Enemy” on a BMG album is the moment this project stops being a rumor and starts being a statement.
Longtime fans know the arc. Early EPs like Sex, Addiction, & Everyone Else and How Do You Love Me. The breakout cover of Tina Turner’s “The Best.” “What Makes You Sad.” The Diane Warren co-write on the debut LP. The rooms where Cieri talks between songs until someone yells “just sing,” and he refuses, because the story is part of the show.
This record is the next chapter, not a rejection of the last one. The same voice is here. The same honesty. The difference is posture. an Attempt at Romantic was about wanting love and admitting it. Nicotine Dolls sounds like a man deciding he will not keep carrying other people’s wreckage just because he is good at feeling things out loud.
If you love Cieri for the rasp, the theater kid who can still fill a club like a cathedral, “Enemy” will hit first as volume. Sit with it. The fury is the point. So is the relief underneath it.
The band plays Blue Stone Arts & Music Festival in Sandy Springs, Georgia, on September 25, then heads to the U.K. and Europe in October — Glasgow, Manchester, London, Dublin, Paris, Amsterdam, Berlin, and more. The album arrives October 23.
For anyone who has watched this band claw its way from subway platforms to a real catalog, the self-titled move is not a gimmick. It is Cieri putting the name on the thing he believes they finally became. “Enemy” is the warning shot. October 23 is the rest of the argument.
