''Devil's Playground'' is the sixth studio album by English rock musician

Billy Idol William Michael Albert Broad (born 30 November 1955), known professionally as Billy Idol, is an English singer, songwriter, musician, and actor. Idol achieved fame in the 1970s on the London punk rock scene as the lead singer of Generation X ...

, released on 22 March 2005. It is his first album in over a decade, the last being 1993's ''

Cyberpunk Cyberpunk is a subgenre of science fiction in a dystopian futuristic setting said to focus on a combination of "low-life and high tech". It features futuristic technological and scientific achievements, such as artificial intelligence and cyberwa ...

'', and his first new songs since 2001, when he covered " Don't You (Forget About Me)" on the compilation album ''

Greatest Hits A greatest hits album or best-of album is a type of compilation album that collects popular and commercially successful songs by a particular artist or band. While greatest hits albums are typically supported by the artist, they can also be creat ...

''.

Background and recording

The album saw Idol reunite with guitarist Steve Stevens and producer Keith Forsey in the studio. All songs were written or co-written by Idol except " Plastic Jesus". The album was engineered and mixed by Brian Reeves at the Jungle Room in Los Angeles. During the recording of the album, the crew of the TV show '' Bands Reunited'' ambushed the Jungle Room and tried to convince Billy to reunite with his old band

Generation X Generation X (often shortened to Gen X) is the Demography, demographic Cohort (statistics), cohort following the Baby Boomers and preceding Millennials. Researchers and popular media often use the mid-1960s as its starting birth years and the ...

for a one-night performance, but Idol slammed the door on them, leading to an apology by the crew.

Release

Idol and the band supported the album with a world tour of

rock festival A rock festival is an open-air rock concert featuring many different performers, typically spread over two or three days and having a campsite and other amenities and forms of entertainment provided at the venue. Some festivals are singular eve ...

appearances in 2005 and 2006, including several performances on the

Vans Warped Tour The Warped Tour is a touring rock music festival that toured the United States and Canada each summer from 1995 until 2019, and returned in 2025 for its 30th anniversary. By 2015, Warped was the largest traveling music festival in the United S ...

. The song " Scream" was used in an episode of '' Viva La Bam'', in which Idol also guest starred, where he and

Bam Margera Brandon Cole "Bam" Margera ( ; born September 28, 1979) is an American former professional skateboarder, stunt performer, television personality, and filmmaker. He rose to prominence in the early 2000s as one of the stars of the MTV Reality tel ...

sing it as they go down the highway.

Critical reception

''Devil's Playground'' was met with "mixed or average" reviews from critics. At

Metacritic Metacritic is an American website that aggregates reviews of films, television shows, music albums, video games, and formerly books. For each product, the scores from each review are averaged (a weighted average). Metacritic was created ...

, which assigns a weighted average rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream publications, this release received an

average In colloquial, ordinary language, an average is a single number or value that best represents a set of data. The type of average taken as most typically representative of a list of numbers is the arithmetic mean the sum of the numbers divided by ...

score of 52 based on 11 reviews. In a review for

AllMusic AllMusic (previously known as All-Music Guide and AMG) is an American online database, online music database. It catalogs more than three million album entries and 30 million tracks, as well as information on Musical artist, musicians and Mus ...

Stephen Thomas Erlewine Stephen Thomas Erlewine (; born June 18, 1973) is an American music critic and former senior editor for the online music database AllMusic. He is the author of multiple artist biographies and record reviews for AllMusic, as well as a freelance ...

wrote: "On this pair of hooky, catchy tunes named after girls, ''Devil's Playground'' points toward an interesting, fruitful direction for Idol – one that acknowledges his veteran status without sounding aged – that he hopefully may wind up taking next time out.".

Track listing

Personnel

– vocals * Steve Stevens – guitar * Stephen McGrath – bass guitar * Derek Sherinian – keyboards * Brian Tichy – percussion, drums *

Julian Beeston Julian Beeston is an English musician, mainly noted for his time in the electronic groups Nitzer Ebb and Cubanate. History Julian Beeston was a member of the industrial band Nitzer Ebb from 1989 to 1992. From 1993 to 2003 he was a member ...

– drum programming *Kevin Anderson – keyboards (uncredited)

Charts

References

{{Authority control 2005 albums Billy Idol albums Albums produced by Keith Forsey Sanctuary Records albums