“Nothing in this world is free,” Jack White tells us on his new album. Whether that’s metaphorically true, White himself proved that it’s factually inaccurate. If you happened to be in London, Nashville, or Detroit on Friday, July 19, and visited White’s Third Man Records shop, his latest offering was, in fact, available at no cost, on white vinyl, given away with another in-store purchase. It’s the most Jack White way imaginable to do a surprise release.
The album — which has no title or tracklist and is being referred to as No Name — might eventually end up getting a normal release. (In the meantime, people have been ripping it and putting in on Youtube.) If it isn’t made available to the mass-consuming public, that would only add to the White-ian irony, since the hyper-localized, untitled giveaway is exactly what many fans have been waiting for from the at times lovably, sometimes lamentably cranky artist. The album is some of the best, most lively garage-blues crunch he’s given us in many many moons, with just the right amount of eccentricity thrown in.
The most frustrating thing about recent White solo work is that it’s often felt self-conscious and contrarian, even when his ideas were kind of interesting. The 2018 LP Boarding House Reach presented White on the cover as a glam shapeshifter and trans ally, an admirable gesture, but the music inside amounted to a series of vaguely unhinged studio experiments. In 2022, he delivered the equally perplexing Fear of the Dawn, which sounded like a guy trying out new gear over funky beats. He followed that later that year with the more down-to-earth Entering Heaven Alive, a largely acoustic set, which suddenly found him sounding almost too mannered, after years of coming off too off-kilter.
No Name fuses the two sides of his persona — the rocking and the weird — about as fluidly as he ever has. The first two tracks (remember, there’s no track list or song titles to speak of!) are basically rap-rock, a little like Rage Against the Machine if their main influence was grotty early-Seventies arena bluster. On the second song, White slips into backwoods preacher cosplay, delivering a sermon on hypocrisy, bellowing “if you’re a cop, then arrest yourself,” before wondering “where did all the love go?” The third starts restrained and verse, and then explodes into some of the thickest, ickiest thump he’s delivered in about 20 years. As the album progresses, White dips into his Willie Dixon bag, his Jimmy Page bag, his Stooges bag, his James Gang bag, wandering from the Rust Belt to the Delta to the murky English moors, all familiar spots for White, keeping the songs concise, heavy, and lean. He isn’t second-guessing himself, or trying to confuse us with inane studio tomfoolery.
The album has some silly moments too, but in the context of its more or less unrelenting guitar grind, they come off as reminders of how well White’s screwball impulses work when they’re tempered and good natured. Driven by his killer slide guitar playing, the ninth track lands between a Led Zeppelin III homage and a zany pop novelty, capped off with a genuinely funny slapstick solo. The final track opens with the sound of children and dogs, then uncorks a Black Sabbath-tinged image of apocalyptic personal reckoning. But this time the end times look a little more like rebirth. In a moment of what feels like unguarded poignancy, White asks, “What’s the point in being free if I’m all alone?” That question could’ve been a guiding principle for music that sounds focused on the pleasures of the people who exist beyond Jack White’s mad-scientist lab.
So, build a time machine to warp back to Friday, book a flight to Third Man Records, and buy something you probably might not want all that much to get yourself a hot free copy of one of 2024’s best rock albums.
