ALBUM REVIEW - THE BLACK KEYS – PEACHES
- Rick E
- 21 minutes ago
- 8 min read
WORDS RICK E
THE BLACK KEYS
PEACHES
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Twenty-odd years into a career that has taken them from Akron basements to festival headlining slots and back again, The Black Keys have made the record that feels like the truest, most unguarded expression of what they have always been at their core: two men who love the blues so much it hurts, who feel it somewhere deep and unnameable, and who are at their absolute best when they stop trying to be anything other than exactly that. With their fourteenth studio album, the gloriously blunt Peaches!, Dan Auerbach and Patrick Carney have not so much returned to their roots as they have fallen back into them — urgently, gratefully, and with the reckless conviction of people who had very good reasons to stop caring about anything except the music in the room.
I will be honest with you — I have been making this journey with The Black Keys since somewhere around 2004, when a copy of Rubber Factory arrived and proceeded to rearrange my relationship with guitar-and-drums duo records in a way that very few records since have managed to touch. The Brothers years were extraordinary. El Camino was a triumph of concision and momentum. Even through the more commercially orientated later period, when the records occasionally felt like the sound of two enormously talented people doing something they were not quite born to do, there was always that underlying knowledge — these two have Thickfreakness in them. They have Delta Kream in them. Give them a room, some live mics, and a crate of 45s they genuinely love, and everything superfluous burns away entirely. That has always been the truth of this band, and now, finally, here it is again: raw and unmediated and absolutely magnificent. Each time they have stepped toward the commercial centre, there has been that question of whether they’ll find their way back to this — and here, with Peaches! they have answered it so emphatically and so completely that the question feels almost beside the point. It always ends up here. It always had to.
The backstory matters here, though Auerbach himself is at pains to note that this was never intended to be a record at all. When his father Chuck was diagnosed with oesophageal cancer in early 2025 and came to stay at Auerbach’s Nashville home, Carney’s response to his bandmate’s understandable anguish was to suggest some studio time — not to make an album, but simply to play. They gathered guitarist Kenny Brown, bassist Eric Deaton, and the irrepressible Jimbo Mathus of Squirrel Nut Zippers on multi-instrument duties, set everything up live in one room with no separation whatsoever — vocals included, no overdubs worth speaking of, one or two takes per track — and proceeded to burn through ten pieces of north Mississippi hill country blues and vintage soul, drawn almost entirely from the obscure 45s Auerbach had been crate-digging for the pair’s ongoing Record Hang DJ sessions. Chuck Auerbach passed away on the 29th of March. What those sessions produced is Peaches! — an album soaked in urgency and grief and love and the very specific kind of joy that only comes from music played without a net — and it is, track for track, the most alive thing this band have released since El Camino at the very least, and arguably since considerably before that.
“Where There’s Smoke, There’s Fire” opens proceedings, and within thirty seconds the entire proposition is laid bare. There is no preamble, no production sheen of any kind, no concession to the listener’s potential need for a warm-up period. Auerbach’s fuzz-drenched guitar hits a groove with the authority of something that has been waiting a very long time to be played exactly like this, and it simply does not let go across five-plus minutes of churning, circling, deeply satisfying blues rock. It is a staggering opening statement — not in the sense of being dramatic or theatrical, but in the sense of being so completely, unambiguously itself that everything else simply falls away around it. Auerbach has compared the sessions that produced this record to their 2002 debut The Big Come Up, and you understand exactly what he means the moment this track begins: this is that same unmediated directness, that same sense of two people playing purely because playing is what they were put here to do, now run through twenty years of accumulated craft and some of the finest source material in the American blues tradition. “Stop Arguing Over Me” follows and drills an insistent, hypnotic groove into the floor and refuses to relinquish it, Carney’s drumming settling into a pocket of such absolute authority that it reframes, for the hundredth time, the question of why anyone ever thought these two needed more instrumentation to be complete.
“Who’s Been Foolin’ You” settles into a churning, lateral groove that sits comfortably in the tradition of the great mid-period R.L. Burnside records — all slow-building atmospheric murk and lateral momentum, the kind of thing that sneaks up on you sideways and occupies the room without your quite noticing. It is not flashy. It does not need to be. “It’s A Dream” then opens outward into something slightly more lyrical and spacious, Auerbach’s vocal carrying the moment with an emotional directness that his more carefully arranged material rarely achieves — there is something about the lack of any safety net here, any possibility of a second attempt or a corrective overdub, that brings out a quality in his singing that production polish has occasionally obscured. And then “Tomorrow Night” — Junior Kimbrough’s own, and the first of his two contributions to this set — comes in at a loose, loping canter, Auerbach’s guitar riding a circular riff with the easy authority of someone who has been playing this music in their sleep for twenty years, the whole thing carrying that specific Kimbrough quality: hypnotic, insistent, worn smooth by the north Mississippi hill country mud it came from. This is what the Black Keys have always understood about this music that so many of their contemporaries have not: you do not cover these songs so much as inhabit them. And on Peaches! they inhabit them completely.
What strikes me about this record — and I have played it an embarrassing number of times in the past week — is how completely it functions as a unified whole rather than a collection of individual performances. The band have spoken about approaching these sessions purely instinctively, with no predetermined destination, and that instinct has produced something with an internal coherence that most carefully planned albums never quite achieve. “You Got To Lose” — an Earl Hooker original, made famous to a generation of rock fans via George Thorogood and the Destroyers’ 1977 debut — was chosen as the lead single, and the choice could not be more apt. The fuzz-guitar tone Auerbach deploys throughout the record is at its most characterful here: simultaneously filthy and warm, simultaneously raw and controlled, the product of enormous taste applied to an enormous riff in the service of an enormous groove. If you are bringing a friend to this record who does not yet know what the fuss is about, start here. “Tell Me You Love Me” then arrives at a more deliberate pace — slower, more plaintive, carrying a weight that the surrounding tracks’ propulsion occasionally makes you impatient for. It is the record’s quiet centrepiece, and it rewards more attention than the immediately more arresting tracks might sometimes draw away.
“She Does It Right” — yes, that is a Dr. Feelgood cover, which should tell you something about the breadth of the crate-digging that shaped this record — is the track that perhaps best illustrates what Peaches! is really about at its core. Wilko Johnson’s original was a live staple for decades: one of the great expressions of British pub rock at its most stripped and essential, a song that sounds better the more you strip away from it. The Black Keys do not so much cover it as use it as a key: they insert it into the lock of the record’s aesthetic and turn. Everything that follows opens wider. "Fireman Ring The Bell" is the album’s grandest statement — nearly six minutes of slow-building, groove-locked intensity that functions simultaneously as the emotional peak and the most explicit articulation of what this exercise has always been about. There is no rush to it, no anxiety about whether the listener is keeping up or whether the tempo needs lifting. It moves at exactly the speed it needs to move at, and in moving at that speed it achieves something that faster, more technically ambitious music almost never manages it makes you feel the weight of the moment completely.
“We weren’t making a record. We were just jamming, like this is for us. Really primal, in a moment when all the nerves were raw, just kinda screaming.” – DAN AUERBACH
The album closes with “Nobody But You Baby” — Junior Kimbrough’s second contribution and, at seven minutes and fourteen seconds, the most expansive and unhurried piece of music on the record. It digs a groove and then descends into it by degrees, Auerbach’s guitar circling and returning and circling again, Carney’s drumming holding the centre with the implacable patience of something geological, the whole thing moving at a pace so deliberate it stops feeling like tempo and starts feeling simply like time passing. It is a closer of extraordinary rightness — not a resolution in any conventional sense, not a tying-up of threads or a sweeping conclusion, but a settling. The kind of ending that makes you sit quietly for a moment when the music stops and then reach back to the beginning without quite deciding to. As a final statement on an album made in grief and catharsis and the love of the music for its own sake, it could not be more appropriate. This is what it sounds like when a band stops performing and simply plays. And it is beautiful.
Peaches! is a triumph not despite its simplicity but entirely because of it. In an era when the pressure to produce something sonically elaborate and conceptually ambitious has never been more acute, Dan Auerbach and Patrick Carney went into a room, pulled out some 45s they loved, and played until the grief and the adrenaline and the deep, sustaining love of this music all ran together into something indistinguishable from each other. The result is their most honest and most human record in years — immediate, visceral, alive in every performance and every slightly-imperfect vocal, made by people who were not trying to make a classic but made one anyway. There is a generosity to it, too: in choosing these songs, honouring these names — Kimbrough, Hooker, Burnside, Brilleaux — and recording them with this much devotion and this little distance, Auerbach and Carney are doing what the very best blues-rooted artists have always done: pointing back toward the source and saying, go and find this, it will change you. It changed them. And it will change you. It will not be for listeners who require production gloss and architectural ambition and carefully managed dynamics. That, of course, is entirely the point. The music on Peaches! knows exactly what it is. It has known all along.
Dig out the 45s and crack the windows — The Black Keys have found their way all the way home.
4/5
PEACHES! – FULL TRACK LIST
Where There’s Smoke, There’s Fire
Stop Arguing Over Me
Who’s Been Foolin’ You
It’s A Dream
Tomorrow Night
You Got To Lose
Tell Me You Love Me
She Does It Right
Fireman Ring The Bell
Nobody But You Baby
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