The Pretty Reckless pushing all the right buttons

All hard rock albums are exercises in teenage rebellion, even the ones made by 50-year-old men. But “Going to Hell,” the second full-length release from New York-based band The Pretty Reckless, takes its mission as a button-pushing outrage machine seriously.

There are enthusiastic porn star sex noises (“Some people think it’s me,” says lead singer Taylor Momsen. It isn’t), plenty of heavy-handed crucifixion metaphors and Momsen naked on the cover, painted with an arrow helpfully pointing to her backside.

Momsen used to be a child actress, and to most of the public her image is still fixed somewhere between her roles as heartwarming imp Cindy Lou Who in “How The Grinch Stole Christmas!” and troubled teen Jenny Humphrey on the CW series “Gossip Girl.” It’s in the vast gulf between Taylor, America’s Little Sister, and Taylor, Bride of Satan (“Getting heavy with devil/ You can hear the wedding bells”) that fortunes are made, but Momsen says, only slightly convincingly, that blowing up Jenny Humphrey was never the point.

“One was a character, and one is something that I wrote as me,” she says in a recent phone interview. “I don’t think of it like that at all, but maybe some people do.”

Momsen began modeling at age 2 and worked fairly steadily until her semirancorous departure from “Gossip Girl” in 2010, after the formation of The Pretty Reckless. Its first album, “Light Me Up,” was a novelty; the band’s second was a hit. “Going to Hell” has yielded two No. 1 radio singles, the first album from a rock band led by a woman to have done so since The Pretenders. It almost didn’t happen.

“We switched record labels, (and) we really didn’t know if this record was going to be released,” Momsen says.

“Going to Hell” was recorded in Hoboken, N.J., at Water Music Recording Studios. The name of the album proved unhappily prophetic.

“We went through a lot,” Momsen recalls. “Hurricane Sandy took out the studio, which was devastating. … Right after that, our producer’s wife passed very unexpectedly. She was like a mother to everyone, and it really devastated us. No one’s over it. The record’s dedicated to her. There’s a lot of pain in this record. You can hear that in the songs.”

“Going to Hell” is restless and diverse, and also funny and kind of charming. For all Momsen’s naughty-Catholic-schoolgirl-in-ripped-fishnets efforts, it’s harmless hair metal that wants to be more scandalous than it is. Any “Gossip Girl” die-hards still clinging to the idea that Momsen’s music career is merely a rebellious phase will be disappointed, she says.

“I quit acting almost six years ago. I’ve toured the world multiple times, released two records. Acting was my childhood, and I can officially say I’m not going back to it. It’s a past life.”

Between albums, The Pretty Reckless toured with both Marilyn Manson and Guns N’ Roses, the latter on one of the legs of that band’s endless “Chinese Democracy” tour. Momsen may not have necessarily absorbed much from the experiences (“I’m not really one for advice. I want to make my mistakes and learn from them”), but they were cred-enhancing at a time when the band needed it. They also helped underscore the differences between the life of an established actor and that of a struggling musician on the road. Momsen says that backstage partying never tempted her. “I’m not a big partier by any means. I’m 21, and I drink less now than I did when I was a teenager.”

Still, actors on TV shows are cosseted creatures; girl singers in baby bands, with a grueling schedule of interviews, photo shoots and shows, and few off days, are more like pack mules with eyeliner.

“It’s completely the opposite,” Momsen says cheerfully. “But I always lived like a gypsy, I guess, so the transition to touring wasn’t hard for me. I’m not posh at all. I can get down with the boys.”

onthetown@tribune.com

Twitter @chitribent

When: 7 p.m. Friday

Where: House of Blues, 329 N. Dearborn St.

Tickets: $20; 800-745-3000 or Tticketmaster.com