Photo: Romeo Okwara

Following an unusually dark few years, The Black Keys round up the gang and dig into their roots on a new set of raw and raucous blues covers. 

Dan Auerbach didn’t intend to start work on the next Black Keys record when he congregated with his longtime bandmate Patrick Carney and a group of close musical friends in the early months of 2025. But it turned out to be exactly what he needed during a particularly trying time.

“My dad got sick, and we had to cancel a tour,” the 47-year-old singer/guitarist says, as he traces the origins of his group’s new, garage-y set of electric-guitar charged blues covers, Peaches! “He was staying at my house while he was dying, basically, and Pat suggested we get into the studio to do something to take my mind off things. He said, ‘What do you want to do?’ And I said, ‘Well, let’s call the gang and jam,’ and we just started jamming.”

Photo: Romeo Okwara

The guitarist had an incredibly special relationship with his father, Charles “Chuck” Auerbach, an arts antique dealer who h encouraged his son’s interests in music from an early age. As a thank you, Dan even produced Chuck’s late-in-life solo debut, Remember Me, enlisting some top-shelf Nashville talent and releasing the record through his Easy Eye Sound label on Father’s Day in 2018. When Chuck suffered a stroke and was diagnosed with esophageal cancer, Auerbach brought him to stay at his home in Nashville and helped care for him during his final days. The 46-year-old Carney, who grew up on the same street as the Auerbachs long before The Black Keys coalesced in 2001, saw what his bandmate was going through and decided to lend a helping hand as best he could.

“Dan’s dad had gotten sick in September, and then it got much worse in January, and it became pretty clear,” Carney says. “So I just called the South American tour because his dad had a terminal cancer diagnosis—rather than put it on him, I canceled the tour, and then we found ourselves with a really hard thing. Dan and his dad were very close, and it was a very difficult time, watching his dad dying, essentially, any day. And I thought it was a good idea for Dan to get out of the house and do something that would be constructive. This was the perfect opportunity because it’s not writing, it’s just channeling. You can kind of turn your brain off.”

The results of that welcome escape were as raw and real as anything The Black Keys have produced during the past quarter century, and highlights have now been issued just over a year later as Peaches!—their 14th studio album and a lightning-quick follow-up to last August’s No Rain, No Flowers and 2024’s Ohio Players. A stylistically specific set, it’s both the sequel to 2021’s Delta Kream, a collection of Hill Country blues-inspired covers tracked with guitarist Kenny Brown and bassist Eric Deaton, and a nod to the duo’s earliest efforts, which helped win over both pasty record-store denizens and roots-loving improv fans who frequent the outdoor live-music circuit.

“To me, this record almost feels more like our first album than anything we’ve made since then because it was made in the same exact way, where we took these songs that Pat had never heard, and I threw them at him to see what would happen,” Auerbach adds. “And because of that, it’s almost the most natural Black Keys record since the first one. Half of these songs Pat had never heard and some of them the other guys had never heard. I’d certainly never tried to play any of them and that was half of the fun.”

“I can always see the connection back to the first album on anything we’re working on,” Carney adds as a caveat. “But, in this instance, it was a lot like the first album, and a lot like Delta Kream, which was the first time we made a record where we had other players cutting things live with us. And since then, we’ve only done it like that a few other times. With “I Forgot to Be Your Lover” on Ohio Players and a few songs like that, we cut it with extra guys in the room. But, for me, shaping it sonically and framing it alongside the early stuff was important. It’s the same energy, essentially, as where the demo for The Black Keys came from. We’ve never put that out, but it was cut live. There were no overdubs. On this, there were a few overdubs, silly things like horns on “Where There’s Smoke, There’s Fire.” But literally 99% of it was live, including the vocals.”

The Black Keys have gradually expanded their personnel over the past two decades, both in and out of the studio, while remaining a two-piece at their core. This time their self-described “gang” included three musicians who share a love of the North Mississippi Hill Country blues so essential to the Keys’ early DNA—Deaton, Brown and Jimbo Mathis, who added guitar, keyboards and stray percussion. And, as soon as they entered Auerbach’s Easy Eye Sound studio, the newly minted quintet jumped into the list of covers the guitarist had stored on his phone, knocking out most of the record over five afternoons, playing just a few hours a day. In Carney’s words, it was “just enough time to get Dan’s head in a good spot every day.”

“I keep a running list of songs I might like to record in my notes at all times,” Auerbach says of the material, some of which he’d loosely earmarked for a Delta Kream sequel in his mind already. “I’ll hear something and be like, ‘Oh, man, this might be fun to cover at some point.’ So we weren’t really making a record. We were just making music.”

The process was purposefully chill: Auerbach would spend about 10 minutes writing down the lyrics, figuring out the chords and deciding what key he could sing a given selection best in. And then the ad-hoc combo would just jam out.

“We wouldn’t even really listen to the original at all,” the guitarist says. “I was dictating the tempo, just kind of going by what felt right to sing in my own pocket. The Dr. Feelgood song we did [Wilko Johnson’s “She Does It Right”], I absolutely love, especially the live version where they’re just geeked. But they’re playing it so fast, it’s not really like me and Pat. We don’t play that tempo, so we played it at our own speed and found our own pocket for all these tunes.”

Sadly, Chuck passed away in March of 2025 and was never able to hear the final results, which were released in May of this year on Easy Eye Sound, though the charged sessions remain dedicated in his honor.

“Everything’s connected to my dad,” Auerbach says. “He introduced me to music; he took me to see the Grateful Dead for my first rock-and-roll show. He would go on trips to the South with me to go see the juke joints, and he took me to Nashville for the first time, and we went to Robert’s. The first time I saw Kenny Brown play in Cleveland, he was with me.”

While The Black Keys owe far more to R.L. Burnside than Jerry Garcia, Auerbach pauses for a moment to expound on his tangential roots in the latter player’s community. The Grateful Dead were Chuck’s favorite band and, when The Black Keys trafficked on the fringes of the jamband world early on—and Auerbach cited them as an influence on his more psych-rock-informed side-project The Arcs—he already had firsthand experience with their songbook.

“He used to ride around back in the country and go to different, little out-of-the-way antique shops and people’s houses and flea markets,” Auerbach says of his dad, a whiff of nostalgia audible in his voice. “I used to travel with him all over the place and we would just listen to live Dead over and over. So, before I really played guitar and before I had ever played out, I knew all these songs by heart. The energy of those songs—I got to hear them that night with Jerry singing, and it was magical.”

He still has vivid memories of the Dead concert he attended with his father at Ohio’s Richfield Coliseum in the ’90s, shortly before Garcia passed, when he was a young teenager.

“I remember tripping out—I had no idea what the fuck was going on because it was all the people in the parking lot,” he says. “Everybody was walking around holding up a finger. I didn’t know what was going on, man, with the people selling balloons. We got to our seats, and everybody’s dancing—the whole stadium was dancing, and they weren’t even on stage yet. From our vantage point, we could see the stage and also behind the stage. And behind the curtain on stage, there were little tents set up. And every time this dude with white hair would go from one tent to the other, the whole coliseum would start cheering. And I was like, ‘What is going on?’”

Later this year, The Black Keys will mark their 25th anniversary, but Auerbach and Carney’s personal history stretches back even further than that. They both grew up in Akron, Ohio—first meeting when the drummer was only 9 and his dad moved into the Auerbachs’ neighborhood—bonding over music in high school. And when Auerbach’s band bailed on a lo-fi demo recording session that Carney was producing in his basement in 2001, the drummer stepped in.

The Black Keys played their inaugural show at Cleveland’s Beachland Tavern in March of 2002. Prior to the band’s inception, they had both dropped out of college and were working for the same Akron property owner. At the time, Carney was primarily a guitarist and had never performed live behind the kit. Yet, from the get-go, they had a special musical bond, though their record collections didn’t exactly mesh.

“Pat learned how to play drums playing with me, but also, when Pat and I first got together when we were 16, 17, he was into indie-rock,” Auerbach explains. “He was listening to shit like Tortoise, which I’d never heard of, and Modest Mouse, which I’d never heard of, and I was listening to T-Model Ford, which he’d never heard of, and Junior Kimbrough, which he’d never heard of.”

However, they did find an area of overlap, which helped birth their distinct sound. “The one thing we both had in common was he had a 45 of R.L. Burnside, ‘Georgia Women.’ He liked John Spencer Blues Explosion and had gotten into [Burnside] through that,” the guitarist says of their early hangs. “I was like, ‘Hey, man, you know R.L. Burnside?’ And he was like, ‘Well, not really, I just have this 45.’”

That 45 ended up being the foundation stone for their sound and a continuous thread throughout their evolution from the scrappier, blues-punk of their first full-length effort, 2002’s The Big Come Up, to the more polished blues-rock displayed on 2010’s Danger Mouse-produced Brothers, as well as their sojourns in the worlds of psychedelia, pop and hip-hop. (2009’s Blakroc was a high mark for that era’s rap-rock mashups, featuring RZA, Mos Def, Ludacris and Ol’ Dirty Bastard, among others.)

The Big Come Up sprinkled Burnside and Kimbrough covers, as well as a memorable take on The Beatles’ trippy “She Said She Said,” between The Black Keys originals and the duo have continued to look back on their love of the Mississippi blues at almost every step along the way, including the 2006 tribute EP Chulahoma: The Songs of Junior Kimbrough. The quickly recorded Delta Kream, which was cut in a matter of hours in 2019 and released during the pandemic when fans were yearning for the energy of the live experience, reminded listeners of their musicality after a period of mainstream success, and it was nominated for Best Contemporary Blues Album.

Photo: Romeo Okwara

For Peaches!, instead of simply using the 2025 sessions as an early draft, The Black Keys decided to stick with the sessions’ natural ruggedness, which combined the intensity of their early work with the might of the large-scale touring outfit the group has brought on the road in recent years. They also dug up a few like-minded songs they had tracked with Deaton and Brown a few years earlier, like Levester Carter’s “Stop Arguing With Me” and Burnside’s “Firemen Ring the Bell,” and wove those into the final product. Some additional guests ended up lending their services as well, including their touring percussionist, London Souls’ Chris St. Hilaire; Junior’s drummer son Kenny Kimborough; and a horn section consisting of Daptone family staples Cochemea Gastelum, Jared Tankel, Ian Hendrickson-Smith and Dave Guy. (Another familiar face from that world, Tommy Brenneck, arranged the horn parts.)

“Dan’s dad passed away right after we did this—a week or two afterward,” Carney says. “We went back on the road. I’d done some rough mixes of it before we left for tour, and at some point, when we got back in September, I just jumped back into them. I was doing the roughs at my studio, and then I took them over to Dan’s studio and started working on them. He was working on some other Easy Eye stuff, and I would just call him over after a couple hours of working on each song to hear it and we did that for a few weeks. At some point, we thought we had a record.”

“We didn’t re-record anything. We didn’t really fix anything,” Auerbach admits. “It was haphazardly recorded – the guitars were bleeding into the vocal mics, so it was a nightmare to mix. We spent way more time mixing it than we did recording it.We spent a few days recording it and a couple months mixing it, going back and tweaking. It was mostly about fighting the rawness of it, trying to make it speak through the speakers.”

Carney notes that, at times, the looseness of the sessions made the post-production a bit more difficult than normal. “Dan’s amp was right behind him,” he says, echoing his bandmate’s thoughts. “We did it so haphazardly because it was more of an exercise to get Dan out of his house for a minute, so when I finally sat down to mix it, I was like, ‘Holy shit, the guitar’s just up all the way right into the vocal mic.’ But that was a good problem to have. It reminded me of back when you had an 8-track tape machine, and we didn’t really know how to use it, but you had an idea of what it should sound like.”

The Black Keys have high praise for all three of their primary Peaches! collaborators and note their places in the band’s own expanding universe. “Kenny Brown was R.L. Burnside’s guitar player for decades, and every time I saw R.L., Kenny was at his side playing. He called him his white son. He’s just got a very distinct style. He played on all the Junior Kimbrough records that I love,” Auerbach says. “And it wasn’t until I got in the room and started playing with him that I realized, ‘Oh, shit, man, he’s such a huge part of those records. He’s not just in the room; he’s really heavy on the sound of those records. He’s been our hero since we started, even before The Black Keys were a band; Kenny was a unifying factor. He’s very important to us in the foundation of who we are, and we’re connected in a way that we didn’t even realize until we started playing together later in life.”

The guitarist also feels a kinship with Deaton, whose musical journey paralleled his own in many ways. “He heard Junior Kimbrough, and it changed his life. He moved to Mississippi, he played with Junior, he toured with Paul Jones and T-Model Ford, and he dedicated his life to that music,” he says. “He’s my guy. When we play together, we just have this really natural connection because we come from the same school. It’s this little idiosyncratic style of blues that we both got obsessed with. So it’s very easy to play with him, and I feel like he really grooves with that in a way that a lot of bass players don’t. It’s because he and I are very similar.”

Mathis, who is best known in certain circles as the frontman for the hip Chapel Hill, N.C.-bred hot jazz combo Squirrel Nut Zippers, entered the Black Keys’ orbit through Auerbach’s production work.

“I love the records he makes,” Auerbach says. “I’ve had him to the studio before to work on records—we made the Valerie June record together back in the day with Richard Swift [2013’s Pushin’ Against a Stone], and I just love his style. When it comes to that raw sound, he’s the man.”

Carney, whom Auerbach affectionately calls The Black Keys’ “dates guy,” first saw the potential of the five musicians getting in a room together when they shared the stage in Nashville during the annual AMERICANAFEST.

Photo: Todd Moffses

“Dan does this Easy Eye Fish Fry, and we’ve played it the last few years,” he says. “Our tour was essentially done, and after touring all summer, for that we decided to ask Jimbo, Kenny and Eric to come up, and we played live with those guys. Afterward, we were like, ‘Man, wouldn’t it be fun to play ‘Gold on the Ceiling’ with Jimbo playing the Farfisa?’ There’s something about him that reminds me of my Uncle Ralph, who is a musician and a huge influence on me. [The elder Carney was an architect of the “Akron Sound.”] What’s funny is that Jimbo didn’t even know we were related. We were doing an interview in front of Jimbo a couple weeks ago, and someone brought up Ralph. And Jimbo had no idea. He’s like, ‘You’re Ralph Carney’s nephew?’”

Though Peaches! is technically a covers collection, The Black Keys believe that description isn’t entirely accurate.

“It’s all covers, but no one’s gonna know the originals, so it’s not really a covers record to most people,” Auerbach says. “It’s like an Elvis record where it’s all covers or a Frank Sinatra record where it’s all covers, but you don’t think of it as a covers record. It’s a thoughtfully selected production. We’re not focusing on one artist. We’re not even focusing on one continent. We’re just trying to pick some interesting songs that suit our sound and our natural tempo. ‘Tomorrow Night’ only came out on a High Water Records compilation that Dr. David Evans put together later on, so it was a very rare song. Not many people have heard it. I don’t know anyone who’s ever covered it – the only other person who knew it was Eric, and I’d never even tried to play it, although I’d listened to it a million times. It’s just been one of my favorites, and they’re just very special recordings to me. They have a special sound and a special groove.”

He singles out Charles Fisher Jr.’s “It’s a Dream”—noting that it’s “a crazy, cool record that’s part of a double-sider that’s absolute fire” and a highlight of their DJ hangs—and “Tell Me You Love Me” by Jesse Mae Brooks, who The Black Keys frontman describes as “an absolute badass Hill Country artist.”

He adds, “She comes from a long line—her dad was Sid Hemphill. They’re famous for doing the goat roast and the fife-and-drum picnic once a year, which I never got to see. I did get to record with a couple of the guys that would play there regularly in Nashville. But I love her record so much and have always wanted to record something from that.”

They also tied Peaches! directly back to Delta Kream with its conceptual imagery. “We wanted to bookend Delta Kream with a less spacey, more energetic version, but it skewed somewhat Memphis-heavy,” Carney says. “We even used another [William] Eggleston photo on the cover.”

Peaches! arrives after a roller coaster of a few years for The Black Keys. In 2024, following the release of Ohio Players, The Black Keys canceled an arena tour reportedly due to poor sales, which led to a rocky period that resulted in them parting ways with their management and returning to the studio to create the well-received No Rain, No Flowers with Songwriters Hall of Fame inductee Rick Nowels at the helm. (They also, curiously, turned heads by playing a crypto event.)

No Rain, No Flowers was a more finely tuned affair, featuring contributions from several of the pair’s behind-the-scenes musical heroes; the duo’s re-energized spirit segued right to the emotionally charged but powerful Peaches! sessions. However, Auerbach doesn’t necessarily see their LPs as part of a single continuous thematic line.

“I don’t know if they relate, just like Brothers doesn’t really relate to El Camino, musically, at all. We never make the same record twice, sometimes to our detriment, but we follow the spirit,” he says. “We try to chase the magic at the moment when we get together.”

“No Rain, No Flowers was very specific,” Carney elaborates. “We had just been fucked. We had just made a record that I was crazy proud of, so there’s a melancholy there. I don’t think we could make a record like No Rain, No Flowers ever again. We happened to be in the studio, and that’s how we dealt with it. I feel like the Peaches!-type record we could make every week. The exciting thing is when we end up going into the studio and capturing something. Brothers, for instance, that is very specific [to the] Black Keys. Maybe we’ll come across something like that one more time, but it was just the state we were in at that particular time. When we’ve gone back into the studio every time since then, it’s never been like that. It was just this mood. And I think that’s what’s special about a record, and that’s also what can make your career a little bit more difficult, especially if you land on something that people really resonate with and then you change the sound.”

Likewise, over time, Carney says he’s learned to stop worrying about how listeners might react to any left turns they might take.

“When we made Brothers to El Camino, I was very nervous. I was like, ‘I don’t know if people are gonna like El Camino,’” he notes. “It was so drastically different, and Brothers had resonated, and then El Camino also resonated, and then we made True Blue. I was like, ‘Well, this is drastically different than these two records, but I love it.’ And that record is resonating more now than it did when it came out. And we don’t need to make a Peaches! again because we’ve done it, but we can still play it live.”

Since 2022’s Dropout Boogie, The Black Keys have also opened up their creative process, working with co-writers and bringing guests like Billy Gibbons into the fold.

“There has been a lot of joy in playing and writing with other people, letting people in,” Carney says. “The first five or six years of the band, it was very isolated. You play this game where you’re not letting people in, but you eventually do. We got to a point, around 2020, 2019, where it started to be fun to write songs with another person in the room and let someone else choose the best option for whatever song we’re working on.”

The same goes for The Black Keys’ live band. Famously a two-piece outfit early on, they have used extra musicians on the road since 2010, beefing up their live road band with bass, keys, percussion and other instruments.

Photo: Romeo Okwara

“We’ve played with so many great people at this point, from Richard Swift to Gus Seifert and the guys from the last five or six years,” Carney says of their shifting lineups, which have also included modern-soul staples like Leon Michels and Nick Movshon, as well as “Delicate Steve” Marion. “People tell us we would make more money if we went back to the two-piece [configuration] and that is somewhat enticing, but not really. I’ll put it this way. We do these DJ nights, and we banned hip-hop from it because the minute you play rap, you can’t go back. Nothing can compete. And I feel the same way about bass guitar. It’s always been one of my favorite instruments, and until you play with it, people don’t realize how essential it is. The whole anchor for the record is Eric. That’s the secret glue.”

Carney notes that The Black Keys’ first few shows with the expanded lineup were trial by fire on some vaunted stages, like Manchester, Tenn.’s Bonnaroo Music & Arts Festival, where the group was one of the first acts to grow from a more intimate tent stage in 2004 to main-stage headliners a few years later. “Back then, I would never get nervous at a show. And that was our best set at Bonnaroo,” he says of their 2010 play on The Farm. “It was hot as fuck. It was a four-piece show, and that was brand new to us. We’d only done it, at that point, for three weeks—our first show as a four-piece was opening for Pearl Jam at Madison Square Garden. I think that Bonnaroo show fucked me up for the whole summer because I got profoundly dehydrated. I sweat so much that my shirt went from sopping wet to bone dry.”

He then adds with a laugh, “I don’t think I learned how to hydrate until like two years ago.”

Having been through the wringer a few times now, the band also put considerable time and thought into the types of places they were playing on their current Peaches ‘n Kream World Tour, which will stretch through the summer.

“When it came down to what venues we wanted to play on this tour, we were like, ‘We don’t want to play venues where everybody’s seated in the front,’” Auerbach says. “So we made it a point to pick venues where that is not the case. Pat said that our shows were like a mullet—business up front and a party in the rear. So we’re trying to invert the mullet, and it’s all open seating GA in the front now. We’re trying to heighten the energy all around, on stage and off.”

“You play this venue, then you get to this other venue, then you get to this venue and everyone—your management and your label—really wants you to go bigger and bigger. And it’s exciting,” Carney admits, nodding to their recent struggles. “Last year on the amphitheater tour, it was good, but we realized that if there wasn’t a pit or a general admission floor, the shows had the most expensive tickets up front. One of the most fun shows we played last year was in Boise, Idaho, in a field, when it was 95 degrees. It was like, ‘That’s the fucking shit.’ And then our show in London was outside of Alexandra Palace, and it was maybe the most magical show that we’ve ever played. It was electric. We’re definitely being more thoughtful towards that as we work our way into our third decade of doing what we’ve been doing. It’s depressing when you go on tour and you look at your list of venues and it’s the same ones you’ve always played. That’s why I look to someone like Bob Dylan and the choice of venues that he picks, or Tom Waits when he rarely goes out. For someone like me who has crisscrossed the country 60 times but never taken a proper road trip, this is as close as I’ve come to that. I like it when we get to hit places like Portland, Maine, or New Hampshire. We just played our first show in New Hampshire.”

The drummer is also excited that they are swapping their setlist a bit from night to night, allowing them to dig into their now extensive catalog.

“Sometimes we put out a new record, and we only end up playing one song from an album each night,” Carney says. “With 14 albums and our set being 20 songs, we want to anticipate what people want to hear. We put ourselves in a good position because with most of the songs that we’ve released, especially on records like Delta Kream or Peaches!, the version on the record is the second, third or fourth take. At the same time, we’re gonna go play ‘Lonely Boy’ for the 1,000th time, and you’re probably gonna get a better rendition of it than the recording. But I guess they’re different beasts.”

Auerbach, for his part, is pumped to not only dust off material from throughout their catalog but also rework their repertoire more than usual going forward.

“We’re definitely switching it up for this tour. We’re gonna play a bunch of the songs from the new record because, honestly, they’re so much fun to play. And I think that making this album really unlocked something in us. When you start to have big hits, it’s hard to think about yourself being a band that stretches songs out,” Auerbach says. “You play the songs as they are, and that’s pretty much what people want to hear. But we had so much fun stretching all this out, and we found out that we could do it. We’re gonna continue to do that on this tour, not only with the new songs but also with the old material. We’re gonna stretch out old songs that we never have.”

photo: Danny Clinch

The Black Keys’ current live band also includes St. Hilaire, bassist Andrew Gabbard and Barrie Cadogan, the guitarist who performs as Little Barrie. “It’s gonna be badass—a real raucous, raw band,” the guitarist said before the run kicked off this spring. “We’re gonna be chooglin’ pretty heavily.”

During the first few months of the run, the band has already generated some excitement in the live arena. In New York, they played an intimate date at the newly renovated Manhattan honky-tonk Lucinda’s with the full Peaches! ensemble, which included their debut of a Junior Kimbrough song. In Clarksdale, Miss., they staged a pop-up show at the famed Red’s Blues Club, where both Brown and blues-harmonica legend Charlie Musselwhite sat in. And, in New Orleans, they went from a wet, marquee set at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival to a funky DJ hang at the intimate Toulouse Theatre.

Along the way, they have brought several Easy Eye acts on the road as direct support, inviting Eddie 9V out for a cover of the Dead-adopted Crickets classic “Not Fade Away” in both Brooklyn and Philadelphia. Yet, even after so many miles on the road together, Auerbach and Carney, now more ever, appreciate their special bond.

“If you’re gonna try to have fun in the creative pursuit of making music, you have to just go where your heart is headed and not paint too much,” Carney says. “We try not to be too methodical or premeditated about it and sometimes you hit on something that hits. And then, sometimes, we’ll make a song that I’ll never listen to again. And then there are songs where I’m like, ‘How did we do that? That was fun.’ That said, there are bands that make the same record over and over and that is also great. You know what to expect. AC/DC’s five records are interchangeable, but they are all great. But if you are lucky enough to have found a musical partner and been able to figure out how to stick together, you can keep it interesting for 20 years.”