The Black Keys - Peaches!

Peaches! is The Black Keys going back to the source, a 2026 covers album cut live in the room with the amps turned up and the second-guessing switched off.

The idea grew out of a hard stretch. After Dan Auerbach's father was diagnosed with cancer, Patrick Carney suggested they simply jam through favourites from their record collections. The result is their fourteenth studio album, self-produced, tracked with no separation between players and mixed by the duo themselves, a deliberate throwback to the scrappy feel of their earliest records.

The song choices are a crate-digger's dream, leaning on the hill country blues that shaped them from the start. "Fireman Ring the Bell" honours R. L. Burnside with a rolling, hypnotic stomp, and Burnside's longtime sideman Kenny Brown adds guitar to the sessions. "Nobody But You Baby" stretches a trance-like groove past the seven-minute mark, while "You Got to Lose" tips its hat to Earl Hooker by way of George Thorogood.

Elsewhere, Wilko Johnson's "She Does It Right" gets a punchy makeover with a full horn section, proof the pair can swing as well as grind.

Every track brims with affection for the music that made them, and the whole thing sounds best played loud on a Saturday night.