View photos NEW ORLEANS, LA – OCTOBER 29: Taylor Momsen of The Pretty Reckless performs during the 2016 Voodoo Music + Arts Experience at City Park on October 29, 2016 in New Orleans, Louisiana. (Photo by Tim Mosenfelder/Getty Images) More

Most musical artists yearn to be recognized, earn money, and enjoy a self-indulgent lifestyle. But 23-year-old Taylor Momsen had already experienced all of that when she abandoned her acting career and launched her hard rock band, the Pretty Reckless, in 2009. She’d been acting since she was 7, and in 2007 her TV career peaked when she played Jenny Humphrey on the popular series Gossip Girl. Momsen had also worked as successful model for IMG before she gave it all up for rock ‘n’ roll.

At the time, Momsen was considered a bit of a loose cannon. Though she was just 15 when the band started and 16 when their debut album Light Me Up came out, Momsen was rebellious and provocative — flaunting her sexuality onstage, using shock tactics to attract a crowd, and engaging in the kind of behavior that gives parents of teenage girls nightmares.

“I look back at some of the outfits I wore and I go, ‘Wow, I don’t know what I was thinking,’ but I was certainly honest at the time,” Momsen tells Yahoo Music. “I was young, and I think it was good that we got that out of our systems in the beginning.”

Whether the antics and bravado played a role in her success or not, Taylor Momsen is still going strong six years into her recording career with her band’s third full-length release, Who You Selling For. The album debuted at #13 on the Billboard album chart and its first single, “Take Me Down,” hit #1 on the rock chart, making it the band’s fourth consecutive song to top that chart.

Like 2014’s Going to Hell, Who You Selling For is a gritty album full of bluesy guitars and propulsive hard rock rhythms. But while Momsen has strived to be controversial in the past — exposing her bare back and most of her rear end on the front cover of Going to Hell, for instance — these days she chooses a different way to express herself. The new album’s title addresses the slippery slope between commerce and art, and the songs, which explore hard rock, blues, funk, soul, and pop, bristle with the frustration of giving up family, stability, and privacy to follow a dream.

“I’ve sold my soul to rock ‘n’ roll,” she glibly says. “I’ve given everything to music. You have to do that. When you love something so much, you have to fully commit to it, and that means giving everything else up for it. But at the end of the day I get to scream into a microphone every night, and that’s f—ing awesome. I wouldn’t trade it for anything.”

YAHOO MUSIC: You touch on many different music subgenres on Who You Selling For. And it sounds like you have more than a passing familiarity with each.

TAYLOR MOMSEN: It wasn’t intentional to go all over the place with this record, but when [guitarist] Ben Phillips and I were writing, we tried really hard not to limit ourselves. As soon as you put any limitations on yourself as a writer, you’re immediately stunting yourself. So nothing was off the table. The reason we love rock ‘n’ roll so much is it represents freedom and it really does encompass everything. Rock ‘n’ roll is everything — it’s the blues, it’s jazz, it’s funk, it’s country, it’s pop. It’s all those things, so you can go in so many different directions and it’s still rock ‘n’ roll.

People from Gene Simmons to Lenny Kravitz have declared that rock is dead. Clearly it’s not, but it seems like there’s a narrower idea today of what rock entails.

As soon as the word “Active” got put in front of “Rock,” it became very testosterone-based. We’ve always had the same motto – “try not to try” — and that’s something we really tried to implement on this record. It wasn’t about being fast or heavy or slow. We really tried to capture the human element with each of these songs, and that’s why all the great records that have lasted the test of time are great.