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It’s a strange thing to say about one of the most prolific artists of his – or any – generation, but: Jack White has been undergoing something of a career renaissance of late. After firmly establishing himself as one of the most beloved and defining figures of 21st-century rock with his early-00s blues duo the White Stripes, White seemed to get bigger and bigger over the next decade-plus, releasing albums with well-liked side projects the Raconteurs and the Dead Weather, dropping a couple of fine solo albums, and helping spark the music industry’s vinyl revival with his label and pressing plant Third Man Records.
But, at some point in the mid-2010s – around the release of his third solo album, 2018’s Boarding House Reach, let’s say – White’s influence and celebrity seemed to be outweighing his actual output, with rising pop stars like Billie Eilish and Olivia Rodrigo naming him a prime influence. Record plants the world over became backed-up, thanks to pop stars releasing dozens of gimmicky vinyl variants of their own albums, resulting in months-long delays for indie artists – hardly a problem White was responsible for (and likely one he himself was annoyed by), but certainly the result of a craze he had helped spark. At the same time, all the quirks and codes of White’s output – the specific colour schemes and sometimes arcane guiding opinions – threatened to overwhelm the immediacy and sharpness that had once been the core of White’s actual music.
White has spent the past couple of years proving that reputation isn’t all that important if the music slaps. In 2024, he released his sixth album No Name with little fanfare – unlabelled copies were slipped in with purchases at his Third Man stores, which is a kind of fanfare, just a more chill one – to overwhelmingly great response. Wholly comprised of the kind of mean-mugging blues-rock that he had made his name on, No Name’s back-to-basics approach was a welcome reminder that, beneath the huckster magician vibe, White was still deserving of his stature.
Frozen Charlotte, White’s follow-up to No Name, finds the 51-year-old digging his heels in further, wholly embracing the more brutal, squally and squalid side of the 70s blues rock that’s always informed his work. Opener GOD and the Broken Ribs, a bolshie, ridiculous retelling of the Genesis story, sets the terms, with White rapping over a muscular blues chug, between histrionic guitar solos: “Watch me rock, then I roll baby / And it’s let me out, let me out, let me shout / Right from my soul, with salt and coal / Now listen to me roll with it.”
The 40-odd minutes that follow are loud and ostentatious and seemingly more focused on production and instrumentation than the witty, political No Name. Heavy delay effects give Raising the Grain a wobbly, enjoyably destabilised atmosphere, as White sings about how he’s going to “boil in linseed oil” before he enters “the catacombs where the river flows”. You’ll Never Fix Me is an old-fashioned White garage barnstormer, its vaguely defiant lyrics seemingly less important than the immense sense of rebellion that seeps through in White and his band’s nasty, anarchic riffs.
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As on No Name, it is enjoyable to hear White back in this no-frills mode, with a fury and meanness in his voice that really sells a line like “click clack, back track, tick tock, smack talk”. This is a pure form of fan service, but it’s preferable to the overblown White solo records that preceded No Name, and will probably feel a whole lot better live than anything from, say, 2022’s clowny Fear of the Dawn.
Even so: while Frozen Charlotte is fun, and rarely feels laboured, it can be a lot. Unlike No Name, there is little stylistic variance between songs, and by the time you reach She’s in a Frenzy, you start to wonder if the album has simply looped back to the start, and you’re listening to the same overdriven guitar solos and sneery punk-rap from earlier. Frozen Charlotte works best when leaving this zone, as on Neighbors Blues, a genuinely bonkers potboiler that plays like a theme song for Neighbors, the HBO show from earlier this year about outlandish real-life disputes between people who share a fence. The simmering aggression renders the track far more effective in creating tension than many other songs on the record, which tend to play their hands early, neutering White’s great sense of dynamics. It’s an ironic quirk of the album as a whole: this record may be part of White’s stripped-down renaissance, but it might have been helped by an even more back-to-basics approach.
This week Shaad listened to
Twisted Teens – Florida Water Blues
The first single from the breakout New Orleans punk duo’s second album of 2026 softens the pace of their last record and dials up the soulfulness.
