Petra making new music after more than 50 years

Petra wasn’t the first Christian rock band. It is, however, the first to make it to 50 years. And its new album Hope marks year 52.

Or maybe it’s 53 or 54. Petra’s golden anniversary took place in 2022, 2023, or 2024, depending on whether you mark the group’s beginning as the year it first formed (1972), the year it signed with Myrrh Records (1973), or the year it recorded its first album (1974). Releasing the three-disc anniversary collection Fifty in 2023, the band itself seemed to split the difference.

Or maybe not. The year before that, it had embarked on a 50th-anniversary tour in its latest iteration: Cristian Borneo (drums), Greg Bailey (bass), John Lawry (keyboards), the Head East alumnus John Schlitt (lead vocals), and Bob Hartman (guitar). Hartman had long been the group’s sole remaining founding member, while Lawry and Schlitt had been aboard since 1986, Bailey and Borneo since 2013—when Petra celebrated its 40th anniversary.

Ten years before that, Hartman, Schlitt, and Bailey had released what, until Hope, everyone thought would be their final studio album of original material, the Peter Furler–produced and unabashedly metallic 30th-anniversary Jekyll & Hyde. If the band’s longevity is uncommon in contemporary Christian music, so is its revolving-door lineup (Wikipedia lists over 20 former members) and the degree to which its sound inevitably changed as a result. The heartland rock of albums one and two, the transitional Washes Whiter Than, the Journey-meets-Kansas facsimiles of the Greg Volz years, the ever-shifting producer-determined (and no doubt market-driven) sounds of Schlitt’s lengthy tenure—“Petra” had in some ways become more brand than band.

Hope, however, is surprisingly good, probably because it doesn’t sound beholden to any previous Petra stratum or as if Hartman, Schlitt, et al. are out to “prove” anything. Even the uncharacteristic steel drums and reggae riddims of “Oxygen” and the old-school synthesizers in “We Rejoice in Hope” feel more like someone’s idea of fun than the calculated ticking of demographic boxes.

Other factors in Hope’s favor: Schlitt, who’s in his mid-70s, doesn’t sound a day over the age that he was when he debuted on Back to the Street, and Hartman’s lyrics, while as predictably biblical as ever (the passages that directly or indirectly inspired each song are listed in the CD booklet), avoid clichés and concessions to the lowest common denominator. The result is that everything—the heavier numbers, the poppier numbers—sounds natural, sincere even. And, in the end, isn’t that what really matters?