Peaches!

The Black Keys — 2026

“Peaches! turns a no-pressure session into the band’s strongest blast of garage blues in years.”

There is a version of The Black Keys that spent years chasing the arena and lost something real in the process. Peaches! is the sound of them finding it again, and the circumstances that brought the record to life make it impossible to separate from what you hear. When Dan Auerbach’s father fell critically ill in early 2025, Patrick Carney did what any good friend would do: he got the band together and turned the amps all the way up. The resulting ten songs, recorded live in the room with guitarist Kenny Brown, bassist Eric Deaton, and Jimbo Mathus of Squirrel Nut Zippers fame, were never supposed to be an album. That lack of intent is exactly what makes it feel like one of the best things they have done in roughly 16 years.

The approach mirrors what made Brothers and El Camino so satisfying, but this goes even further back in spirit. Every track was cut in one or two takes, with the guitars bleeding loud enough into the room mics that you can practically feel the reverb. These are mostly obscure songs that Auerbach discovered while digging for 45s to play at DJ sets, but the band treats them less like source material and more like fresh jams. They fire up something and figure it out together, which gives the record a loose, pressure-free momentum that their recent work only shows glimpses of. I think this is the most consistent they have sounded since they were just two guys in an Akron basement with nothing to prove.

“You Got to Lose” is the record’s biggest crunch, a George Thorogood scorcher that the Keys tear through with a grinding, killer stomp. Carney’s kick drum alone sounds like it could knock a wall down. “Where There’s Smoke, There’s Fire” goes the other direction, pulling a Willie Griffin number into something slow and genuinely haunted, with Auerbach’s guitar tone sitting low and thick across the track. “She Does It Right,” originally a Dr. Feelgood protopunk burner, gets rebuilt from scratch as a swampy boogie that sounds like it rolled out of an Ohio basement with its fuzz and deep groove. Its distorted vocal pushes it back toward the raw edge of their earliest records. And “Fireman Ring the Bell” throws a second drum kit into the room alongside Carney and lets the guitars wail overhead until everything feels like it might fall apart, which is exactly the point.

This record taps the sounds of some early White Stripes, the greasy groove that R.L. Burnside made sound effortless, the sweat and drive of a Black Joe Lewis album, or the way Jon Spencer Blues Explosion could take a simple song and run it straight into a wall. Peaches! feels like something you have been waiting on for a while from The Black Keys.

Peaches! thrives on its spontaneity and passion for making music. You really can hear that in every overdriven note.