Review

By Chloe Liston | 12/05/2026

Peaches! finds The Black Keys doing what they do best: stripping things back for a self-assured and effortlessly cool sound. This covers album isn’t about reinvention, but reconnection. Reconnection to the loose, road-worn charm that made El Camino a hit. A cinematic quality runs throughout the record, one which cries out for a visual Fear and Loathing…-like counterpart. It’s a dusty, sun-faded collection built for long drives and smokey pool halls. From opener Where There’s Smoke, There’s Fire, a gritty rework of Willie Griffin’s original, the tone is set from the off. The guitars hum rather than roar, the drums hit heavy but unhurried in a heady and haunted soundscape, while Dan Auerbach’s vocals drift through it for an effortless five minutes. The band flesh these tracks out just enough to give them weight, but resist tipping into excess or maximalism as so many artists do when trying to prove themselves against originals. It’s restraint as a stylistic choice, and mostly, it works. The sense that Peaches! is a soundtrack by nature only amplifies as the album unfolds. Songs arrive in waves of tension and release, like cues rather than standalone moments. You can almost picture the scenes it’s trying to score. The desert highways, the late-night diners, the hot and heavy nights. But that’s also where it falls a little short. For all of its atmosphere, Peaches! rarely delivers the payoff those moments seem to promise. Without a narrative to latch onto, some tracks drift by too easily, blurring together in their shared, slow-burn aesthetic. The consistency and ownership are impressive, but it feels devoid of those standout moments and emotional beats. The kind that make songs unskippable. This is a confident, curated, and refreshingly unbothered album by a duo comfortable in their own skin. But like a score without a movie, Peaches! leaves you waiting for something that never quite arrives.