Despite The Black Crowes’ 2024 release, Happiness Bastards, earning a Best Rock Album Grammy nomination—they lost to the Stones—and potential Rock Hall accreditation—they were not voted in—the band played it smart with their newest studio album. A Pound of Feathers, their 10th overall release, largely follows the course set by its predecessor, which found brothers Rich and Chris Robinson looping back to the approach that worked so well for them earlier in their four-decade career.

For Happiness Bastards, the music was stripped to its hard-hitting basics, eschewing most of the expansive experimentalism that had crept in prior to the band’s long hiatus of the early 2000s. The Robinsons, for all intents and purposes, have always been The Black Crowes, and any pretenses that they ever cared to lead a cohesive band were tossed for good once they reunited in 2019.

For A Pound of Feathers, the siblings take the reins even more authoritatively: Rich plays all of the guitars on the 11-song album—including bass—and Chris wrote all of the lyrics. And although there’s a keyboardist (Erik Deutsch, returning from Happiness…) and a new drummer on board (Cully Symington), as well as two support singers (MacKenzie Adams and Lesley Grant), it’s apparent from the bombastic crunch of opener “Propane Prophecy” that this is all about the bros. Also returning from the last outing is producer Jay Joyce, who’s got a firm handle on how best to position The Black Crowes in the mid-’20s.

“Pharmacy Chronicles,” the second single from the album, like more than a few classic Crowes tunes of the prime era, follows a Stones/Aerosmith ballad template, stacking wailing electric guitars upon an acoustic-based intro, its lyrics more often impenetrable than not, to an impressive effect. There’s plenty of crashing, pounding rock too (“Blood Red Regrets,” “Do the Parasite!”)—no worries—but all in all, A Pound of Feathers showcases a well-rounded Black Crowes as they were in their first incarnation.