Peaches! is, on paper, the kind of record veteran bands make when they've run out of new ideas: ten covers, self-produced, mixed by the band themselves rather than handed to an outside engineer. In practice, it's the opposite of a victory lap. Dan Auerbach and Patrick Carney built the Black Keys' reputation on exactly this kind of unpolished, two-person blues-rock, and two decades into a career that has drifted toward bigger, more produced records, going back to covering the blues and garage-rock songs that built them plays less like nostalgia and more like a genuine correction.
“You Got to Lose,” the lead single and the record's clearest statement of intent, makes the case loudest. It's a cover of an Earl Hooker blues number best known through George Thorogood & the Destroyers' 1977 version — and where Thorogood's take is a strut, the Black Keys' version is closer to a sprint, faster and rowdier in a way that makes even the “double-time” Thorogood arrangement sound restrained by comparison. Auerbach sings the title line — “you've got to lose, you can't win all the time” — like a man who's actually had the year to back it up.
The whole record leans into that same unrefined energy rather than smoothing it out, and it mostly earns the comparisons to the band's 2002 debut that have followed it. It won't be the album that wins the Black Keys new fans — a covers record rarely is — but for anyone who missed the two-piece, live-room version of this band under the last decade of increasingly polished production, Peaches! is the record that brings it back.