After a five-year break partly precipitated by a wave slamming Patrick Carney against the ocean floor, the Black Keys reconvened for their first record in that many years: 'Let's Rock.' The result was solid, lively, and well-received. But despite drummer Carney's description of their first self-produced album in years as "an homage to electric guitar," 'Let's Rock' felt uncharacteristically restrained. At least compared to early albums like Thickfreakness.
"I don't think 'Let's Rock' is going to go down as our best record or our worst record," Carney tells GRAMMY.com over Zoom. "It was a new thing, because we hadn't made a record without a producer in a decade." This sheds some light on the part of the Black Keys' catalog that made them world-famous: Danger Mouse produced or co-produced everything from 2008's Attack & Release to 2014's Turn Blue, and they won four GRAMMYs in the process.
Without Danger Mouse, Carney and his lifelong creative partner, singer and guitarist Dan Auerbach, found themselves much as they started as teenagers: two nonbiological brothers, writing and performing blues-based rock. But despite its merits, 'Let's Rock' acted as a throat-clearing for the Black Keys' third chapter.
Afterward, they recorded 2021's Delta Kream, a shot-from-the-hip album of hill-country blues covers. That album begat Dropout Boogie, the Black Keys' rewarding new album, out May 13.
Eleven albums in, the four-time GRAMMY winners and 11-time nominees seem to have nailed exactly what Black Keys music in 2022 should sound like: raw, electrified, leaping from the speakers. Dropout Boogie also bears evidence of Auerbach's increasingly prodigious stature as a producer for outside artists — as well as both men's development as musicians.
Yet the top-down-cruising vibe of "Wild Child," "Your Team is Looking Good" and "Baby I'm Coming Home" shows they haven't forgotten the appeal of the albums that truly put them on the map, like 2010's Brothers and 2011's El Camino. And their bond seems more ironclad than ever, to hear the pair tell it, which says a lot with years of spats, disappointments and breaking their bodies on the road — as well as the pressures of joint global fame — in their rearview.
"We're probably better than we've been in years — in a really great, great place," Auerbach tells GRAMMY.com, also over Zoom. Carney concurs, remembering meeting Auerbach in the early days while hungering to play in a band. "I always thought I could help this guy make better music than he could on his own," he says. "And I think that is mutually true for me."
To understand Dropout Boogie, you have to frame it within the context of Delta Kream. That album consisted of covers of interpretive artists associated with the Mississippi hill country subgenre of blues, including John Lee Hooker ("Crawling King Snake"), Mississippi Fred McDowell ("Louise"), R.L. Burnside ("Poor Boy a Long Way From Home," "Going Down South") and, on half the album, Junior Kimbrough.
"This is basically folk music on a certain level, and a lot of this music is like hand-me-downs from generation to generation," Auerbach told Rolling Stone in 2021. "I'm singing lyrics that are like third-generation wrong lyrics. I'm singing a certain version that Junior recorded where maybe he messed up a line, but that's the only one I know. So we were really just kind of flying by the seat of our pants."
The GRAMMY-nominated Delta Kream was just supposed to be a jam between Auerbach, Carney, R.L. Burnside's electric guitarist Kenny Brown and Junior Kimbrough's bassist Eric Deaton. "There are absolutely no overdubs on the entire record, and we just sang everything once," Auerbach reports. "We made this thing, and it was so simple." The quartet recorded the album in a day and a half, then didn't listen back for months.
When they finally revisited the Delta Kream sessions, the Black Keys had a lightbulb moment. That embrace of looseness, that surrender to the seaswell of tradition, hadn't just an interesting diversion: it had completely revitalized the band and renewed their purpose. "When I finally went back to check it out, I was like, 'Oh, shit. That's the energy there. That's it. That's the feeling I want to come through the speakers when someone listens to our band.'"
Wanting to make that feeling last, the Black Keys dove straight into Dropoff Boogie, an album of originals with writing contributions from ZZ Top's Billy Gibbons, Greg Cartwright of the Memphis rock band Reigning Sound, and GRAMMY-winning Nashville producer Angelo Petraglia, who's worked with everyone from Trisha Yearwood to Kings of Leon to Taylor Swift. Gibbons co-wrote and played on "Good Love"; Cartwright and Petraglia helped tighten up "Wild Child."
"Your Team is Looking Good" contains an indirect — and obscure — writing credit, one that the Black Keys' attorney had to hunt down. "I was like… there's this obscure field recording of a cheerleading squad from the middle of nowhere, Mississippi. I need you to find the writing credit so that we don't get sued,' " Carney told ABC News."It turned out to be "The Girl Can't Help It," which Bobby Troup wrote and Little Richard performed; Troup got the credit.
The inclusion of outside writing voices alone makes Dropout Boogie stand apart from past Black Keys albums. "Dan and I tend to… work on co-writes or work on stuff that's been co-written, but we, ourselves, never do it," Auerbach told The Star in 2022. "And it was really refreshing, honestly."
Another way Auerbach and Carney leveraged the freewheeling spirit of Delta Kream for Dropout Boogie was by killing their darlings when necessary. "Any song that felt a little bit forced, we just dropped it off the record. We left four or five on the table and moved on," Carney says. "They were good songs — they would have made it on 'Let's Rock' — but they just didn't vibe for what we were doing."
At its best, Dropout Boogie sounds like yesterday's dirty soul, R&B and blues refreshed for 2022. "It Ain't Over" digs into a deep, winding groove to underline its theme of circularity and ruts; the darker-hued "Good Love," brambled with layers of fuzz, makes the search for devotion sound suitably treacherous; "Burn the Damn Thing Down" gorgeously juxtaposes Auerbach's buttermilk singing with a growling, droning, one-guitar-lesson riff.
Plus, here's a treat for fans of simple, swinging drumming: Carney is arguably playing the best he's ever played. When considering his drumming on Dropout Boogie, Carney plugs it into the classic rock tradition, noting that even AC/DC, a band largely beholden to 4/4 and not exactly tethered to jazz influences like the Rolling Stones or Black Sabbath, still had an underdiscussed sense of swing.
"When I hear it just come down the pipe, like straight aligned to the grid, it feels very weird to me," Carney says, surveying a landscape of nominally "rock" music that misses that crucial element. "It can work as a pop song or something, but it never translates as a rock thing to me."
"I'm in awe of a guy who can control his swing," he continues. "Even the worst jazz drummer is better than me when it comes to that, but I swing, push and pull off the beat, moving around the one." Says Auerbach: "Pat's just an amazing drummer, and he keeps getting better — and more and more open-minded when he's in the studio with me. Hopefully I'm the same."
Lyrically, the Black Keys still rely on somewhat stock idioms from "streets of gold" to "ashes to ashes, dust to dust," but maybe that can be chalked up to some of their bluesy forebears' MO: keep it simple. Overall, the strength of the melodies, singing, vibe, and production — the latter an intriguing mix of thin and buzzy, and dense and wooly — makes Dropout Boogie a winner.
"I'm pretty critical of the music we make, and I think this record is one of our better records. It's in the top couple," Carney says. He zooms out, considering the Black Keys' early-2000s peers who are now hitting the two-decade mark, like Interpol and the Strokes: "I'll always be glad to know that after 20 years, we made a record that I would be f***ing stoked to have put out, like, right after El Camino."
Despite the Black Keys being on an upswing, Carney is aware that Auerbach holds his production work to equal importance — and that the band could be put on ice again. "It's very cyclical, a band. There's hot and cold moments. And when there's a hot moment, you've got to keep going," he says. "I realize that a couple of years from now, Dan might not be as interested in doing the Black Keys as much, so we might go through another break."
But, as he says, the Black Keys are seizing on this period of momentum. Not only do they have a North American tour with Band of Horses kicking off in July and stretching into mid-October; on the day of the interview with Carney, he had been in the studio with Auerbach.
"We have not stopped working, and we're having a blast," Carney says. In that regard, Dropout Boogie isn't just a return to their roots in sound and approach, but in spirit. If the ultimate point of playing rock music is to have one hell of a time, Auerbach and Carney fulfill it here.
They may be castigated in a public school in the "Wild Child" video, but on Dropout Boogie, the Black Keys — as the kids say — understood the assignment.
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