The Black Keys

Dropout Boogie ★★★☆

“The riffs come fast and furious” on the Black Keys’ “superb” 11th album, said Hal Horowitz in American Songwriter. Fame and fortune haven’t dulled the arena-packing duo from Akron, Ohio. Singer-guitarist Dan Auerbach and drummer Patrick Carney paid tribute to their influences with last year’s Delta Kream, a collection of raw hill-country blues covers, and Dropout Boogie finds them once more “wading into the banks of the muddy Mississippi.” This stripped-down set of blues rock “feels like it’s live in some juke joint”—partly because Auerbach “sings with soul and zero pretense.” The album’s collaborative efforts are “uniformly excellent,” said Joe Gross in Rolling Stone. Garage-rock savant Greg Cartwright co-wrote the lead single, “Wild Child,” while ZZ Top’s Billy Gibbons delivers a “perfectly Top-tastic” guitar solo on “Good Love.” The bulk of Dropout Boogie, though, simply sounds like “gloriously oldschool Keys.” While rock “barely exists in the pop conversation it once dominated,” this pair’s ongoing popularity makes its own case: “Their rock ’n’ roll minimalism is more than enough.”