HERE COMES THE RAIN

For The Black Keys, 2024 is a year they’d like to forget. But with a new outlook and approach feeding into new album No Rain, No Flowers, they’re hoping 2025 will be one to remember.

- Words: Paul Rees

Dan Auerbach and Patrick Carney, collectively The Black Keys, couldn’t telegraph their present state of mind any clearer than they do on the opening, and title, track of their forthcoming thirteenth album together. Chiming keyboards usher in a ringing guitar melody, a gambolling rhythm on its heels. The first words out Auberach’s mouth on the record are: ‘Let it go... You’ve got to let it all go’.

If that wasn’t specific enough, there’s the title itself: No Rain, No Flowers. After their well-documented annus-horribilis of 2024, which included an aborted US arena tour, a stillborn album, Ohio Players, and then their wholesale firing of their managers (industry heavyweights Irving Azoff and Steve Moir) and publicist, it casts the pair as somewhat more world-weary but nonetheless defiant after the storm.

All the more emphatic for the backdrop being an irresistible three-minute pop-rock confection.

In total, No Rain, No Flowers conveys as an act of bloodied but unbowed will. As with each Keys album from 2011’s major breakthrough El Camino, it was made at Auerbach’s Easy Easy Studio in Nashville, their adopted home town since 2010. It was started last July, just two months on from the tour debacle, and its 11 box-fresh songs came together on the spot, in the room.

As has also become typical practice for them, Auerbach and Carney bounced off collaborators. In this case a trio of songwriter-producers, Daniel Tashian, Scott Storch and Rick Nowells, respectively well-known for their work with Kacey Musgraves, Dr Dre and Beyoncé, and on Lana Del Rey’s Ultraviolence album of 2014, a record co-produced by Auerbach. The overall mood of their labours is best described by Auerbach as “sad pop”, which is to say wistful lyrics matched with pointedly upbeat music. Or put another way, what's become standard issue from The Black Keys.