THE BLACK KEYS

The story of Ohio Players—The Black Keys’ twelfth studio album and a record unlike any other in their long ride through deep blues and soul power—begins on a Saturday in February 2003. Singer-guitarist Dan Auerbach and drummer Patrick Carney were on the road supporting their debut album, 2002’s The Big Come Up, opening for Sleater-Kinney at New York’s Roseland Ballroom, when the headliners invited them to a party after the gig: the traditional bash following the broadcast of Saturday Night Live with the TV show’s cast and guests.

“This is insane—of course, we want to go,” Carney recalls. “We said ‘How are you getting in?’ ‘Our friend Beck played tonight.’”

Auerbach and Carney were school friends in Akron, Ohio, not yet a band, when Beck’s 1993 single “Loser” —a landmark fusion of Delta blues, hip-hop churn, and post-punk lyricism—hit them like a bomb. “His aesthetic was incredible,” Auerbach says today. “He wore his influences on his sleeve, and we learned from that. There was someone showing us a way to go.”

At the SNL party, Carney handed Beck an advance copy of The Black Keys’ next album, Thickfreakness. Three weeks later, they were offered the opening slot on Beck’s 2003 Sea Change tour. “The Beck influence on The Black Keys was massive,” Carney states gratefully. “He was one of our most vocal, early supporters.”

Beck is now all over Ohio Players, collaborating with The Black Keys as a writer, singer, and instrumentalist on seven of the album’s fourteen tracks. Also contributing across this all-star affair are ex-Oasis guitarist and songwriter Noel Gallagher (three songs); the pioneering hip-hop producer Dan The Automator (two tracks); Memphis-rap cult legends Juicy J and Lil Noid; Leon Michels, who plays with Auerbach in the Arcs; and superstar producer Greg Kurstin (Adele, Foo Fighters), who first met The Black Keys when he was in Beck’s band on that 2003 tour. Many of the backing musicians on Ohio Players are veterans of Black Keys sessions and Auerbach’s productions at Easy Eye Sound in Nashville.

“We had this epiphany—we can call our friends to help us make music,” Carney explains. “It’s funny because we both write songs with other people” for solo and side projects. “But we got to this maturity as a band where not only can we call these friends, but we can deliver music our idols want to play on.”

“We were unafraid to have fun,” Auerbach says, “and dip into everything we’ve always loved”—something he and Carney do as DJs, hosting record-party nights in clubs with their favorite 45s and rare-vinyl finds. “When we’re DJ-ing, we’re playing cumbia, soul, rockabilly. It’s all over the place. When it came time to gather songs for this album, it was that spirit of tying it all together.”

Ohio Players opens with the thick, funky stride of “This Is Nowhere,” born at The Black Keys’ first writing date with Beck at Easy Eye in 2022. The album then swings in mood and groove from the densely layered party time of “Beautiful People (Stay High),” built with Dan The Automator, to the Beatlesque stomp of “On the Game” with Gallagher and the dark-pop gloss in “Everytime You Leave,” hatched with Kurstin and Beck. “Candy and Her Friends” starts as bittersweet glam with psych-fuzz guitar, then drops in tempo and temperature to Lil Noid’s chilling rhyme.

When we were working with other people,” Auerbach says, “we were there to support their ideas, to do whatever we could to see that moment flourish.” He and Carney proudly note that Gallagher, who wrote Oasis’ biggest Britpop hits, had never co-written with members of another band before. But Ohio Players is not a supersession. It’s a Black Keys album, anchored in their fundamental chemistry and bond before with a twist. It’s “something that most bands twenty years into their career don’t make,” Carney says, “an approachable fun record that is also cool.”

Yet “it never feels like we’re sacrificing who we are,” Auerbach contends. In the final crunch of mixing and sequencing, “It was just Pat and me. Our relationship is tighter than it’s ever been.” And Ohio Players has “brought us closer together—in a really musical way.”

Ohio Players is The Black Keys’ fourth album in five years, a momentum with a simple explanation, Auerbach says: “We never stopped recording.” There was his and Carney’s reunion, after a five-year hiatus, on 2019’s "Let’s Rock”, then the 2021 blast of Mississippi-hill-country covers, Delta Kream. A rapid-fire follow-up of new originals, 2022’s Dropout Boogie, featured the duo working with outside writers for the first time: Greg Cartwright of Memphis rockers Reigning Sound and Angelo Petraglia, who has worked with Kings of Leon and the teenage Taylor Swift. (Cartwright and Petraglia are back for Ohio Players too.)

Carney estimates that, at one point, he and Auerbach had “something like fifty songs” underway for Ohio Players, many started “the traditional way—us jamming in the studio.” And there was “no slowing down,” Auerbach says, as the guests arrived. “Beck is so prolific—he’ll write a song one way, then go ‘I’ve got another idea’ and write something with a totally different melody.”

The Black Keys were in London in early 2023 combining work and pleasure—DJ gigs while Auerbach was promoting the Arcs’ second album, Electrophonic Chronic—when they wrote and recorded three songs, one a day, with Noel Gallagher at the hip, analog Toe Rag Studios. “When we were sitting around, talking about the people who write the big songs in the rock & roll world, he was one of those people,” Auerbach says. And there was prior history of a sort. In 2009, The Black Keys were invited to open a tour for Oasis. “But we were busy,” Carney remembers, “and they broke up anyway.”

At Toe Rag, Gallagher and The Black Keys got to work the old-fashioned way—sitting “in a circle with our instruments,” Auerbach says. “I had a vocal mic, Noel had a mic, Pat was on a drum kit and Leon was there with this weird, little ’60s-ish organ.” The Black Keys later nicknamed Gallagher “the Chord Lord. “He would sit there and cycle through chords,” Auerbach remembers. “He didn’t stop until he found the chord that worked with mine.” In fact, the versions of “On the Game,” “Only Love Matters,” and “You’ll Pay” on Ohio Players are all “live performances,” Auerbach declares, “us in the room, playing the songs until they were finished.”

Lil Noid and Juicy J, who appears on “Paper Crown,” joined the Ohio Players guest list late in the game—after being in heavy rotation between sessions. “Dan was playing a lot of Memphis rap from the ’90s that I’d never heard,” Carney says, a slow-rolling, lyrically graphic menace mostly limited to “these mixtapes not on any streaming service, uploaded to YouTube.”

Juicy J (real name Jordan Michael Huston III) was a founding member of Three 6 Mafia, who won an Academy Award for their song on the 2005 soundtrack, Hustle and Flow; Lil Noid (Derrick Harris) is best known for his 1995 tape, Paranoid Funk, a classic of the Memphis “horrorcore” genre and Auerbach’s favorite album from that scene. “We spent the whole year being amazed by this music,” Auerbach says. “That’s part of the reason we had Juicy J and Lil Noid on our record, to tell part of their story.”

“Candy and Her Friends” was “half a song,” Carney admits, “with a cool energy. We reached out to Lil Noid on Instagram; he came in and we played him the song. We have been with rappers quite a bit”—going back to The Black Keys’ 2008 hip-hop project, Blakroc—“and sometimes they take hours and get nothing. But Lil Noid heard it and said, ‘Hand me the mic.’ He started doing some adlibs, which are on the record, and in fifteen minutes he had both verses done. And they were perfect.”

“Paper Crown” began “as a collaboration with Beck—and then we mutilated it,” Auerbach confesses, laughing. “We kept the chorus but slowed it down” and added Juicy J’s rap literally on deadline, just before The Black Keys turned in the finished album. “And it made sense,” Carney adds, “because Juicy J discovered Lil Noid. I sent the track to Juicy’s guy on a Thursday. We had it back on Monday afternoon.”

Ohio Players was ready for the world.

“Credit where credit is due,” Auerbach says of the title, Ohio Players. “It was Pat’s idea. But as soon as he said it, it was instantaneous. It gave us that good feeling. and we didn’t want to ignore that.”

Ohio Players pays homage, of course, to the 1970s funk band, originally from Dayton. And it reflects The Black Keys’ unbroken roots in the state’s blues and rock history: the James Gang; original rock & roll DJ Alan Freed; the Ohio connections in Devo and the Pretenders. Auerbach points out that “the guy who was fixing my amps during my whole young life there” was the brother of the Cramps’ Akron-born singer, Lux Interior. And on Ohio Players, the George Harrison-style lick in “On the Game” is played not by Beatle maniac Noel Gallagher but by “our Buckeye buddy,”—Cleveland guitarist Tom Bukovac.

The title also captures the album’s troupe-like feel of camaraderie and adventure. No matter where they come from, Beck, Gallagher, and the Memphis rappers are now Ohio Players. “We called on so many favors from so many people—that’s the beauty of this record,” Carney declares. “I know what it’s like, being in a young band and wanting to say, ‘This record was written, recorded, produced by us. It was all us.’ But it gets to a point where it’s better if you call all these people who are so good at what they do—to help you do it.”

“I can’t wait—I really can’t wait,” Auerbach says of The Black Keys’ tour plans for Ohio Players. “I haven’t been this excited about a record in a long time. I haven’t worked this hard on one either.

“We took our time” making Ohio Players, he declares. “And we got it right.”