The Black Keys

The Black Keys are two guys from Akron, Ohio, making a racket that sounds like it was dug out of a Mississippi juke joint and run through a blown-out amp. Dan Auerbach sings and plays guitar, Patrick Carney plays drums, and they've been friends since they were kids. They started the band in 2001 after both dropped out of college, cut their first records in basements, and produced them themselves.

Auerbach's guitar is steeped in the blues, the hill country trance of Junior Kimbrough and R.L. Burnside, the growl of Howlin' Wolf, the ghost of Robert Johnson, and Carney hits like he's trying to keep the whole thing from floating off. The Big Come Up came out on Alive in 2002 and got them signed to Fat Possum, and then they did it the hard way: tiny clubs, endless touring, a new record every time you turned around, songs licensed wherever someone would take them. Thickfreakness followed, and Rubber Factory, in 2004, with "10 AM Automatic", won over the critics and pushed them out of the underground. Nonesuch signed them in 2006.

Attack & Release, in 2008, was the first time they worked in a real studio instead of a makeshift one, and the first time they let someone else produce: Danger Mouse, who stuck around as a regular collaborator. Then Brothers landed in 2010 and the garage doors flew open. "Tighten Up" is lean, strutting and catchy as poison ivy, "Howlin' for You" stomps like a high school football crowd, and the album and that single picked up three Grammy Awards. El Camino, in 2011, is even leaner, a fuzzed-up glam-rock hot rod with "Lonely Boy", "Gold on the Ceiling" and "Little Black Submarines" riding in the back seat. It went to number two on the Billboard 200, took them into arenas for the first time, and won three more Grammys.

Turn Blue, in 2014, gave them their first number-one album in the US, Canada and Australia. After a long break for side projects and production work, they came back with Let's Rock in 2019, paid tribute to Mississippi hill country blues on Delta Kream in 2021, and kept going through Dropout Boogie, Ohio Players, No Rain, No Flowers and Peaches! in 2026. Two guys, one groove, and they never ran out of it.

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