Delta Kream by The Black Keys

Delta Kream, the Black Keys' tenth studio album, came out on Easy Eye Sound and Nonesuch on May 14, 2021, and it's the duo finally paying the debt they've been running up since Akron in 2001. It's a covers record of Mississippi hill country blues, cut at Easy Eye Sound, and it opened with their take on "Crawling Kingsnake", modeled on Junior Kimbrough's version and released a month ahead of the album on April 15.

Kimbrough and R.L. Burnside have always been the ghosts in Dan Auerbach's guitar, and here he stops disguising it: the riffs hypnotize instead of hooking, circling and droning while Patrick Carney's drums lay back in the pocket and let the grooves breathe. It sounds like two guys in a room with the amps up and nothing to prove. It served as a reset, too: the next record, Dropout Boogie, went back to writing their own songs.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.