El Camino by The Black Keys

El Camino, the Black Keys' seventh studio album, came out on Nonesuch on December 6, 2011, and it's the sound of a two-man garage band flooring it. Coming off the breakthrough of Brothers, Dan Auerbach and Patrick Carney went back into business with Danger Mouse for a third time, and he co-produced the record with them and helped write every one of its 11 songs.

They did it the hard way on purpose. Between March and May 2011 the duo walked into Auerbach's Easy Eye Sound studio in Nashville with nothing written, then sweated over how each song should be put together. The slow-burners on Brothers had been tough to pull off on stage, so this time they went for speed and hooks, raiding rock and roll, glam, rockabilly, surf and soul from the 1950s through the 1970s. Auerbach's guitar snarls and struts, Carney hits like he's trying to dent the kit, and the whole thing moves. "Lonely Boy" is a gleeful stomp, "Gold on the Ceiling" swaggers on a fuzzed-out glam groove, and "Little Black Submarines" builds from a hush to a crash.

The cover shows a minivan like the one they toured in early on, and the title is an inside joke about the muscle car. It debuted at number two on the Billboard 200, went multi-platinum in the US and several other countries, and sent the duo out on their first headlining arena tour. At the 55th Grammys it won Best Rock Album, and "Lonely Boy" took Best Rock Performance and Best Rock Song. Turn Blue came next.

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