Peaches!

By returning to their sonic roots, The Black Keys sound revitalised, urgent and gloriously unrefined once again. [Jun 2026, p.72]

It’s one of their strongest of the 2020s and across their 25-year career.

Another album of homages, jammed fast and loose in early 2025 at Auerbach’s Easy Eye Sound studio in the wake of a cancer diagnosis for the singer’s father Chuck – who died soon after on March 29. The urgency and catharsis in these tracks makes sense in that context, but there’s something else here: a deep connection with music, felt in every groove and texture. [Jun 2026, p.89]

It’s their fuzz-guitar take on Dr Feelgood’s She Does It Right that holds the, ahem, key to the majority of selections. Dan Auerbach and Patrick Casey spend a lot of the record mining the catalogues on non-household names from the world of blues. [May 2026, p.100]

The live-off-the-floor Peaches! is the antithesis of 2024's overcooked Ohio Players, the duo's nadir, and a delectably scuzzy sequel to Delta Kream, complete with another seductively squalid William Eggleston cover photo. [May 2026, p.26]

They don't try to reinvent the wheel here, largely sticking to the rootsy punk vibe of blown-out speaker vocals, overdriven guitar twang, and thumping drums. Yet, there are still some ear-popping moments.

These versions often aren’t particularly explosive or even all that grabby. In some ways they’re kind of insular, exuding a pickup-hoops naturalism that adds to the music’s deep grind or brackish crunch.

What could be a better way to blow off some grief than turning up the amps and howling out more Kimbrough deep cuts? It is perplexing, then, how staid and complacent Peaches! sounds, how the biggest eruption of the whole thing is right there in the title’s exclamation mark.