‘Music makes billionaires – it’s just it doesn’t pay fairly’

The Black Keys are speaking out against an industry they say is rigged. Ahead of the release of ‘No Rain, No Flowers’, the band tell Mark Beaumont why they are not backing down

- Mark Beaumont

On their recent UK tour, The Black Keys found themselves swept up in the champagne supernova. “We were in Manchester for a couple days right before [Oasis’s] first show there,” says the bold and bespectacled drumming half of the Ohio-via-Nashville garage rock duo, Patrick Carney. “Getting to feel a whole country excited and pumped for a rock band reunion... it was kind of insane. It was amazing.”

“We’ve never really seen anything like it,” chuckles his quieter, more reticent singer-guitarist bandmate Dan Auerbach. But beneath the congratulatory awe, a certain injustice seethes. Recently, Carney missed a local show by his friends Mumford & Sons because news of the gig hadn’t cut through the internet’s blanket big-gig coverage to reach him. “It’s just Oasis,” he says, ensconced today in a sweltering South Carolina. “Everybody in the world knows Oasis was playing Wembley this weekend, but that just takes up so much bandwidth - and rightfully so - on your algorithm.” He considers the plight of the many less-supersonic acts fighting for feed space. “It’s a weird time, man. How are you supposed to get the word out?”

It’s a raw topic for a band emerging, with 13th album No Rain, No Flowers, from a turbulent few years of teetering at the top. The Black Keys have been an arena act since their breakthrough albums Brothers (2010) and El Camino (2011), each topping 2 million sales, made them the world’s foremost post-White Stripes garage blues duo and ad sync favourites. Where the Stripes had revitalised antique Mississippi blues with punkish passion and blown-amp impact, infectious retro blasts such as “Lonely Boy” and “Gold on the Ceiling” added a Seventies soul lustre and a dusty southern edge, as suited to the Tennessee roadhouse as the gospel chapel.