In October 2020, Morgan Wallen was scheduled to perform on the Bill Burr-hosted second episode of Saturday Night Live’s 46th season. But Wallen, perhaps unsurprisingly, violated the show’s COVID-19 protocol and was kicked off the bill mere hours before the lights were scheduled to shine down on a half-full Studio 8H. While many of us were still quarantining at home, the question of who could fill in for Wallen on such short notice became a pressing one. Most of the time, the musical guest on SNL is there to promote new material or capitalize on a wave of undeniable, unprecedented momentum, just as Noah Kahan did this past year (and you can almost guarantee that Chappell Roan will do the same once Season 50 premieres in the fall).
But Lorne Michaels and his crew withheld that template and called upon Jack White to play a few tracks. It was his first performance on the show in two years, when he sang “Connected By Love” and “Over and Over and Over” from Boarding House Reach in 2018. He’d played SNL in 2002 with his ex-wife Meg, as the White Stripes performed “We’re Going to Be Friends” and “Dead Leaves and the Dirty Ground” from their third album, White Blood Cells. Despite remaining one of the most crucial figures in all of post-Y2K rock ‘n’ roll, White’s short history with Saturday Night Live feels like a misfire spent on NBC’s dime. Nevertheless, the always eternal White came to New York City on short notice and delivered two of the greatest performances in the show’s half-century history.
First, he unleashed a medley of “Ball and Biscuit,” his Beyoncé collaboration “Don’t Hurt Yourself” and Blind Willie Johnson’s “Jesus is Coming Soon” onto the stage. Where the first half of the medley felt like a tour de force recounting of White’s long-standing presence in the current musical pantheon, his decision to interpolate “Jesus is Coming Soon” within it was a topical one. “Great disease was mighty and the people were sick everywhere,” he sang. “It was an epidemic, it floated through the air.” Fit with a band of just a drummer (Daru Jones) and a bassist (Dominic Davis), White conjured an entire concerto through his distorted, fuzzing blue Fender Telecaster. Jones wore a pair of safety glasses while pounding his unorthodox kit; that’s how psychotic and chaotic the performance was.
Later that episode, Burr introduced White again, and the Detroit hero broke out a galvanized rendition of “Lazaretto”—a song that was six years old at the time but more appropriate than ever. Of course White was going to sing the one song in his catalog that’s about a hospital for people dying from contagious diseases. He brandished a different blue guitar, this one gifted to him by Eddie Van Halen, who’d died just five days earlier. As White set his fingers on fire at the bottom of the guitar neck, shapeshifting through different pedal tones that took on different lives. After doing some finger-tapping notes out of respect for Van Halen, he broke through the airwaves with a circuit-breaking, face-melting outro solo. It was all splendid and breakneck, done last-minute but never, not even for a second, sounding rushed. Boarding House Reach had found favorability among critics, but White’s experimentalism and departure from his Blunderbuss and Lazaretto projects felt inconsistent. His two-song performance on SNL evoked one important question: What if Jack White made an album that sounded like that night?
Obviously, Fear of the Dawn and Entering Heaven Alive—the two albums he put out within five months of each other in 2022—were not the answer. Both were not met with much reverence from critics; Paste gave the former a 6.5 and the latter a 5.7, respectively. For an artist like White, who first left a mark on rock ‘n’ roll two decades ago by being one of the most consistent and confident songwriters of his generation, his fourth and fifth studio LPs were missteps that sounded like a caricature of the man himself. This is not to say that Blunderbuss or Lazaretto were genre-defining projects when they came out, or that White’s take on blues rock has ever been entirely novel. But, his elemental faith in the craft has always served him well. And it’s that elemental faith that makes him a one-in-a-million guitarist and, perhaps, the most important labelhead of the last 25 years.
Last month, on July 19th, all Third Man Records customers in Detroit, London and Nashville received a free 12-inch vinyl with their purchase. It was a white label LP, with “NO NAME” written at the top in blue. There were no details about it, and the only direction Third Man employees were given was to include it with every sale, free of charge with no questions asked. But customers quickly put the pieces together and discovered that it was, in fact, Jack White’s sixth solo album. Copies of the record were being priced as high as $1,000 on eBay and then, a week later, White played a show at American Legion Post 82 in Nashville and sold official copies of the record to fans. A few more days passed and No Name was slated for its official release.
No Name is the best album Jack White has made under his own name. And, depending on what your White Stripes discog ranking is, it might be the third or fourth best album he’s ever made. (I’d slip it into the #3 slot, in-between White Blood Cells and Icky Thump, personally.) Maybe last year’s 20th anniversary of Elephant got the wheels spinning in White’s head, as No Name sounds exactly like the kind of album you’d have expected him to make right after the disbandment of the White Stripes in 2011. No shade to Blunderbuss, but No Name arrives like the proper bridge between Jack White the bandleader and Jack White the one-man wrecking ball. And, naturally, Dominic Davis and Daru Jones are here again, filling out the band with White’s spouse (and kickass goth-garage songwriter) Olivia Jean, percussionists Patrick Keeler and Carla Azar, bassists Scarlett White, David Swanson and Dan Mancini and pianist Quincy McCrary. White, as always, plays every guitar part on all 13 songs.
Despite the misalignments of Fear of the Dawn and Entering Heaven Alive, White is one of our last true preservationists. To tap into his creative mind is to sort family heirlooms out piece by piece. His catalog is inherently modern, but only by release date. He colors his music with analog hues and is probably allergic to digital techniques. His pedalboard has enough fuzz to make a television set flatline. Gone are the folky traipses of Entering Heaven Alive. The bluesy zig-zags of Fear of the Dawn are tightened up into pure garage ephemera now. No Name is a no-frills enchantment. Despite its title it’s a project Jack White will no doubt want to hang his hat on.
Beginning with “Old Scratch Blues,” White sounds like he never left the garage in the first place. What made that SNL performance so definitive in 2020 was the anger he sang through. “Lazaretto” packed a heavier punch; “Ball and Biscuit” was performed as if White had something to lose if he didn’t rewire the track’s hard drive accordingly. The introduction to No Name is a testament to White’s ability to erect pure, enjoyable, white-hot rock ‘n’ roll. If you thought he lost his edge two years ago, you better watch the corners as you pass this time around—his momentum is sharper than ever. “Bless Yourself” finds White breathing fire into a world collapsing around him. “People say, ‘I need God on command, God on demand,’” he sings. “If God’s too busy, then I’ll bless myself!” The track chugs along with locomotive breath, as White noodles in parables that sound as close to gang vocals as one man can conjure alone. He spits like an MC (“Whose fault is it now? Who do you blame now? You gonna cop to that? If you’re a cop, then arrest yourself”) and reckons like an OG (“They say trust no one, not even yourself. So now I can’t even trust myself? Damn”).
“That’s How I’m Feeling” skyrockets to the top of White’s catalog, arriving as cool and handsome as it does menacing. I have often wondered if the X-factor missing from his oeuvre has been Meg, but No Name demands an immediate rewrite of that thought. He can do it all on his own, and “That’s How I’m Feeling” is Exhibit A through Z. The guitars are so loud and mangled, as the track sounds like a bluesy rendition of Blur’s “Song 2,” but only if it was recorded inside a metal box full of razor blades. With a finger glued to the volume knob, turning it up and down at will, White ushers a Pixies and Nirvana-like sonic equilibrium into the track. “Archbishop Harold Holmes” is a gnarly ceremony to sit through, too, as White drops a sermon that sounds like Fred Durst’s introduction to “Break Stuff” at Woodstock ‘99 (“You got family troubles, man trouble, woman trouble, no light through the rubble?”) before announcing a rebellion against the institutions that oppress the human pursuit of love. His ability to weave religious motifs into symbols of confident, back-breaking affection remains steadfast and devout. “You must bring seven friends and don’t be selfish and keep this all to yourself and don’t eat shellfish,” White shrieks. “Hate is trying to take someone else’s love for yourself, but I’m here to tell you that love is trying to help someone else.”
The beauty of No Name is that it’s stuck at an 11 from the first licks of “Old Scratch Blues” to the final quakes of “Terminal Archenemy Endling.” White goes heavy on the hard stuff just as often as he scales back into the melancholia. The darkness is physical but not without grace. “What’s the Rumpus?” is a no-fuss, anthemic ballast that tumbles into disarray. “It’s not out of context, our love is not a contest,” White declares. “I’ve got a feeling that the truth’s become opinion these days. That train has left the station, but our love will grow.” In an election year, White’s commitment to hope—told through wall-to-wall images of a dystopian present—feels especially punctuated on No Name.
Lines like “They tried to stump us, now what genre will they lump us?” sound like double entendres, and White is practically begging his listeners to interpret the work however they must—as religion, the music industry, politics and romance are all ballerinas balancing on the same thread across No Name. But him singing “It’s an assassination of the already dead, number-one with a bullet but the reputation of a rotten apple is too loud to hear now” now, in August 2024, can only be read in so many different ways. When he fastens his angst into the line “Now both Adam and Eve know they’re naked, so we all have something to fear now” on “Number One With a Bullet,” the frustrations feel familiar and the poetics remain as visceral as ever.
White’s solo songwriting is no stranger to medieval-esque turns of emotion. This is the same guy who wrote about lazarettos six years before hospitals became overcrowded during the pandemic and 7 million people died from COVID. His work toes the line between fantasy and nightmare, tackling the transitory horrors and plagues of the always-dying modern world through truths immune to second-guesses. It’s why “the world is worse than when we found it” feels aptly resolute. But on No Name, too, White taps into Zoomer phrases like “no cap” and “cop to that.” He claims to be skeptical of new trends, but remains stubborn in his quest to employ them correctly. I can go on and on and on about how good this record sounds, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t bring White’s lyricism into focus here—because it’s some of his strongest verse work yet. “It’s déjà vu all over again, the memories are my medicine,” he sings on “Tonight (Was a Long Time Ago).” “And the fatigue is frightening. Well, sometimes it’s over before it begins.”
No Name rarely simmers and is full of juxtapositions. For every mystical turn the album takes, White drops a guitar lick that’ll shuck the skin clean off your bones. Even when the album gets into a groove on “Bombing Out,” “Tonight (Was A Long Time Ago)” and “Underground,” the impetus never lets up: White wants to tear every wall down, and he wants you to feel every nail yanked out of the woodwork. It’s powerful stuff, especially when he sounds like a frontman again. Perhaps that was why Fear of the Dawn and Entering Heaven Alive careened into underwhelming territory, because those records sound like they were made by a producer who sometimes also played guitar. The playing here is terrific and as good as, if not better than, anything on De Stijl, Elephant and Icky Thump; the writing is locked in and the production sounds as consistent as anything he’s ever manned. Throughout the 43 minute-runtime of No Name, Jack White sounds like everything you need him to be.
Matt Mitchell is Paste’s music editor, reporting from their home in Northeast Ohio.
