Dan Auerbach does not want you to think of this as a covers album. As the Black Keys vocalist-guitarist has explained in press materials, the blues rock duo’s latest LP, Peaches!, is “so much of a retelling” of its source material that calling it a “covers album” would oversimplify it. But the former festival titan’s third record in just as many years is at least partially a covers album. These ten songs are spontaneous interpretations of obscure blues cuts from the 20th century, most of which Auerbach discovered while searching for 45s to spin at the band’s official “Record Hang” DJ sets. Auerbach and drummer Patrick Carney crafted this record to sound raw and filthy, but the key word there is “crafted.” Rather than demonstrating the duo in their natural state, à la early records like The Big Come Up and Thickfreakness, Peaches! feels like the sonic equivalent of pre-distressed denim: it looks worn-in, but that’s because it was manufactured that way.
The Akron, Ohio, natives have compared this album to their debut, The Big Come Up, given that each track on Peaches! was recorded in one or two takes, live in a room (vocals included!), and with as few overdubs as possible, save for some shakers here and there. When Auerbach’s father was diagnosed with esophageal cancer in early 2025, the frontman needed to let off some steam. That catharsis arrived in the form of jam sessions at his Easy Eye Sound studio in Nashville. He got together with Carney, alongside a bevy of additional musicians to flesh out the sound: guitarist Kenny Brown, bassist Eric Deaton, and multi-instrumentalist and Squirrel Nut Zippers member Jimbo Mathus. These additions, however, ultimately detract from the music itself, preventing Peaches! from being a tried-and-true return to the Black Keys’ peak duo form. It also muddies the mix into sludgy murk.
Those early Black Keys albums sounded, yes, filthy, but it was to their benefit. It was, for the most part, just Auerbach and Carney in the room, and their interplay resounded with a captivating concoction of clarity, chemistry, and grit. The decision to perform and record live on Peaches! adds to its low-stakes, impulsive origin story, but it loses its sense of identity when three or more supplementary musicians crowd the space. Auerbach’s guitar solos on Wilko Johnson’s “She Does It Right” fight to be heard above the din of nine other performers. On R.L. Burnside’s “Fireman Ring the Bell,” Brown trades in his six-string for a drum kit, joining Carney on the skins, adding to the clamor and taking away from the craft. It gestures toward the album’s contrived premise and failed promise of Raw and Loud Rock and Roll, in which a group that once headlined Coachella attempts to fabricate the sound of an Ohio garage in a luxe Nashville recording studio.
The duo’s first-thought-best-thought ethos results in poor quality control. A frankly questionable rendition of Ike Turner’s “You Got to Lose,” and a by-the-numbers version of Big Lucky Carter’s swung stomper “Stop Arguing over Me,” feel interchangeable for their incessant bluesy shredding and cruise-control chug. That misdirection also manifests in a meandering aimlessness on their seven-minute rendition of Junior Kimbrough’s “Nobody But You Baby,” stretched out into an exhaustive sprawl that could’ve used an edit or two.
Taking the Black Keys’ own argument that this is their “rawest” album at face value, you still wonder where the line gets drawn between the instinctual and the impetuous. Letting your intuition guide your music can yield truly great results (see: the history of jazz and blues), but what the Black Keys gain through an unvarnished production style, they lose in discernment and curation. Peaches! trudges through tedious homogeneity for its ten quasi-covers. It sounds like the musicians themselves had fun playing it, but listening to it is another thing entirely. It mostly sounds like a dashed-off afterthought, a random jam sesh in Nashville, and, against Auerbach’s wishes, a perfunctory covers album. [Warner/Easy Eye Sound]
Grant Sharples is a writer, journalist, and critic. His work has also appeared in Interview, Uproxx, Pitchfork, Stereogum, The Ringer, NME, and other publications. He lives in Kansas City. You can follow him everywhere @grantsharpies.
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