The Pretty Reckless’ Taylor Momsen has reflected on her battles with depression, saying she is lucky that she “chose to move forward”.
The former Gossip Girl actor and frontwoman of the New York band went through a period of grief and subsequent substance abuse following the untimely deaths of Soundgarden frontman Chris Cornell in 2017 and her friend and producer Kato Khandwala a year later.
She opened up about the difficult time she faced in the aftermath of those events in a new interview on the Call Her Daddy podcast, describing Khandwala’s passing as “the nail in the coffin for me”.
“It was a giant one-two punch because they were not that far apart from each other,” she said. “I just went off the rails, I didn’t handle that well. I got very heavy into substance abuse and this cloud of depression that I couldn’t shake.”
She went on to describe how she was able to navigate a way through her depression. “I had to make a very conscious choice at a point where I was either going to live or I was going to die and I had to either stop everything I was doing and get my life together, or this was going to kill me,” she said. “I luckily chose to move forward but it was that serious”.
Articulating how she ultimately found solace in music, she added: “Eventually I got to a place where I could start listening to records again. I very calculatedly went, ‘Where did I fall in love with this? How do I find myself again?’ So I started at the very beginning, which was The Beatles.”
Momsen went on to pour her energy into ‘Death By Rock And Roll’, The Pretty Reckless’ fourth studio album from 2021, which featured a contribution from Rage Against The Machine’s Tom Morello.
In August, the band released their first new music since then, in the form of the single ‘For I Am Death’, and more new music is expected in the coming months. They have also been announced on the line-ups for Download and Rock For People festivals in 2026.
Elsewhere, Momsen reunited with Jim Carrey this week for the first time since they starred together in How The Grinch Stole Christmas in 2000. They were both on hand at the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame to induct Soundgarden.
