After more than two decades together, The Black Keys have built a career around looking backward to move forward. Their best work has always come from that tension—Dan Auerbach and Patrick Carney taking the sounds of blues legends, garage rock outsiders, and forgotten soul records and reshaping them into something unmistakably their own. Peaches! returns to that foundation with the band’s second full-length collection of covers in five years, but unlike a simple exercise in nostalgia, the album feels like a reminder of why those influences mattered in the first place.
Recorded at Auerbach’s Easy Eye Sound studio during a difficult period following his father’s illness, Peaches! began less as a planned release and more as an escape. Joined by Mississippi blues veterans Kenny Brown and Eric Deaton, along with Jimbo Mathus of Squirrel Nut Zippers, the group approached these songs with the loose energy of musicians rediscovering the joy of playing together. The live-in-the-room feel is central to the album’s charm, with guitars bleeding into the microphones and performances that favor instinct over perfection.
The strongest moments come when The Black Keys stop treating the songs like artifacts and start treating them like living things. Their take on George Thorogood’s “You Got to Lose” delivers a heavy, swaggering stomp, while “Nobody But You Baby” stretches into a slow-burning Junior Kimbrough-inspired finale that recalls the hypnotic grooves of Delta Kream. “She Does It Right” transforms Dr. Feelgood’s frantic pub-rock energy into a fuzz-covered blues shuffle, proving that the band still understands how to find the emotional core beneath a familiar song.
Not every moment lands with the same intensity, and some performances feel more reverent than revelatory. But when Peaches! works, it captures the spirit that made The Black Keys compelling from the beginning: two musicians chasing a feeling rather than chasing a trend. This isn’t the sound of a band trying to recreate its past success—it’s the sound of musicians reconnecting with the messy, soulful roots that shaped them. For a group that has spent years navigating expectations, Peaches! is at its best when it remembers there was never anything more important than turning up the volume and playing the blues. – Jason Felton