Hi everyone, Giggens here, and it's my honor to be back on the channel talking once again about The Black Keys, who are now in their 25th year as a band, which is absolutely insane. But they have a new album, their 14th studio album, and it's called Peaches!

Peaches! pretty much serves as the companion album to 2021's Delta Kream, which was one of my favorite albums of that year and one of the best Black Keys albums in recent memory. The emphasis on that album to just make a blues rock record and not care about making a hit album or putting pop songs on it is what made that album so special, and I feel like for a lot of hardcore fans, it brought them back to the early days of The Black Keys, to like The Big Come Up or Thickfreakness or even Rubber Factory, the albums that we fell in love with where they were just rocking out for the sake of rocking out. Last year's 2025's No Rain, No Flowers was a great album. I really, really enjoyed that, and that was for me their best album since Delta Kream.

But now with Peaches! — Peaches! is now the best album since Delta Kream. They've definitely had an incredible release schedule since coming back in 2019 with "Let's Rock," putting out an album basically once a year. And Peaches started life not even as an album.

Sadly, during 2025, Dan Auerbach's dad fell very ill and they had to cancel a tour. And in that downtime, Patrick Carney said, you know, "Dan is a workaholic, he's always doing something." So Patrick was like, "Let's just go into the studio and jam with our buddies here and just see what happens." And they spent a few days in the studio coming up with songs that they had on a list forever of tracks that they always wanted to do, and they weren't really sure where they were going to do them, so they just felt like recording all these songs and just, just for the hell of it. There was no intention for these songs to become an album. There was never an intention to be like, "Alright, we're contractually obligated to make a new record, what's that gonna be?"

These songs were an exercise in therapy really to get away from the hardships of what was happening in Dan's life. It's just a group of guys hanging out creating some incredibly excellent riffy, angular, tough blues rock. That's truly the best album they've done in a very, very long time. The cool thing about this album for me is that like 4 or 5 of the songs on this record, most of the guys hadn't even heard before except for Dan. So they weren't referencing anything; they were kind of going off Dan's leads creating a Black Keys song.

The album opener "Where There's Smoke, There's Fire" truly sounds like it's rising from the ashes of something to find its way back to life, slamming along with a ferocity that you really can't deny. A classic song about a girl you can't get out of your head, and that's just classic Black Keys. They take this song, which is a pretty obscure track, which most of the songs on this album are very obscure, they make it their own, and it just kicks ass.

"Stop Arguing Over Me" features some incredible cymbal fills, some dense guitar work, some fuzzy leads, and Dan is so confidently vocally soaring over this thing, and I love how he just glides through this. It's such a richly packed song, there's so many layers of guitars and percussion work on this thing, and I love how the song just repeats the title over and over and over as the song fades out.

"Who's Been Foolin' You" is one of the best Black Keys songs I've heard in a very long time. The groove on this thing sucks you in. The feeling is such a propulsive forward momentum, you know, sort of track. And Dan just ripping through the vocals, the organ swells for the perfect little touch on the verses. Dig it. Plenty of guitar interplay. It's just one of those songs that scratches the itch.

"It's a Dream" is carried by a simple yet very effective bass line from Eric Deaton, a soulful bunch of harmonica bleeds from Jimbo Mathus, and there's a couple that sound almost out of tune or like he made a mistake, which I love. I love hearing the human element in a song. The playing on this one is classic Mississippi blues. It's gritty, it's heartfelt, it's yearning. It's a very cool track.

"Tomorrow Night" opens with some excellent fuzzy lead guitar work before jumping into just layers of guitars from Dan, Jimbo, and Kenny Brown. The layering provides an excellent bed for Patrick to play under with the drums, just keeping this thing from completely falling off the rails.

"You Got to Lose" was the debut single from this LP, and such a hell of a choice. It's catchy, it's propulsive, it doesn't let up. It's distorted in all the right places for the guitars, and vocally too, but Patrick's drumming on this thing is so playful and hard-hitting. The way he's laying into the cymbals just like beating the crap out of them. I love the free-for-all attitude, the free spirit jam that this track has. It just keeps your head banging. And you know, to be already 5 or 6 songs deep in this record, to have yet another blues rock song keep that momentum going, for them to find another gear to shift into that still moves along and still keeps your interest going— they really did well with the track order on this one.

"Tell Me You Love Me" opens with a bunch of false starts, and then when you finally hear the guys like gel, that expert level of like knowing exactly where to go, it's just so cool to be a part of, to listen to. And I love that this song feels like something they could have written themselves. It sounds like a classic Black Keys track. It's a song about loving someone and never wanting to let them go. I mean, the song is a no-brainer. It was made for them. Like, lyrically, it sounds like a Black Keys song. But I love the way Patrick enters the snare rolls, the slide guitars are great on it, and the overall good time feeling on it is cool.

"She Does It Right" is just an old-school blues tune explaining how this girl does great things for the guy. She just knows how to do it. She does it right. Cool reverb effect on the vocals and the guitars on this one. And if you're feeling a slight dap tone records influence on this one, you're correct, because Mr. Tommy Brennick is on here arranging the horns. A Wilco Johnson tune that once again was made for the Black Keys.

"Fireman Ring the Bell" is an excellent track because the guys are visiting one of their favorites, R.L. Burnside, and the guitars on this one are angry and tight. The vocals are painful and soaring, and lyrically it's about as blues as it gets. It's a story about, you know, trying to leave town, being stuck in jail, hoping your girl's still there, and the only thing that's keeping you going is your baby's voice.

"Nobody But You" closes out the record and finds the group jumping back into their Junior Kimbrough era. Lyrically straightforward and to the point. It's a simple plea about not wanting your girl to go because you love her. It's, you know, definitely a "Baby, please don't go" kind of vibe. The track rolls along with excellent cymbal swells and crashes and gritty guitar interplay, and Dan's vocals are at the point of desperation throughout this one. The song pushes past 6 minutes, building and building into a rock and roll blues inferno before eventually falling apart with one final "burp" to end off the album.

The Black Keys' sound is what got us into the band in the first place. If you've been on the ride with them since day one, or at least even the last like 15 years ago when Brothers came out, you kind of know what you want from a Black Keys record. They shook things up for a while when they got really popular in the 2010s, when they had some good pop-rock hits and some crossover appeal, and a lot of people who had no idea what the blues were were discovering the Black Keys and going back into their catalog and revisiting blues records they never heard of thanks to what these guys were doing. And for a band that's 25 years deep into their career, I mean, not every album is going to be perfect, that's impossible, but, you know, to be this deep in their career and put out an album this great is really, it's truly something.

The band is just doing what they do best. They went in, they busted it out, and you hear it in the performance. It sounds like they're having a great time. It's a Black Keys classic. I really enjoyed last year's No Rain, No Flowers, but this one just blows it away. This album proves that the guys are just as hungry as ever and they just wanna rock out. They flow together so beautifully and so perfectly and serve as a reminder that the human experience will always create the best art. As painful as that sometimes can be.

This will easily be one of my albums of the year for sure. If you enjoy the earlier Black Keys stuff and Delta Kream, this album was made for you. It scratches the itch. I'm feeling an 8 on this one for sure.