Nine Jack White albums you should listen to and one to avoid

Jack White studio portrait — (Image credit: Matt Carr/Getty Images)

The White Stripes were love at first sight. Granted, it’s unlikely that anyone beyond a pocket of Detroit hipsters witnessed Jack and Meg White’s first show at the Gold Dollar bar on August 14, 1997. Likewise, the following year’s 1,000-unit run of debut single Let’s Shake Hands was ample to satisfy demand. Back then, few would have advised the frontman to quit his day job as a furniture upholsterer (a suitably luddite profession for an artist who cited Son House, Robert Johnson and The Mississippi Sheiks, and who would cling to the old analogue ways by dirty fingernails).

But with 2001’s White Blood Cells, the world snapped to attention. In an era of boys-next-door and gurning, keg-party nu-metallers, the ink-haired, colour-coded White was an unknowable rock star like they used to make them, seemingly dreamt up in a Tim Burton sketchbook.

Add to that, his visceral fusion of old-time Delta motifs and spit ‘n’ sawdust modern attitude, making him a stone-cold guitar hero in an era when we were told the species was extinct (it’s telling that White filled the third slot in 2008’s It Might Get Loud documentary, alongside Jimmy Page and The Edge).

By the time 2003’s commercial peak, Elephant, lumbered into view – heralded by the primal seven-note bellow of Seven Nation Army – it seemed the Stripes were not just a jump-start for the new millennium but a band for the ages.

A quarter-century later, should White have achieved more? Certainly, there are fans who have never forgiven him for burying the Stripes alive in 2011: a move whose woolly motivations have still never been fully explained. Others counter that White has had a more interesting run because of it, whether raising sunken treasure with his Third Man label or pinballing between solo albums and side-projects (of varying merit).

At a glance, it can all feel a little bitty – a portfolio career rather than a solid shift in a cohesive band – but there’s gold here if you pan for it. And while it all started with the blues (and came full circle on 2024’s No Name), Jack White has surprised us at every turn.

“He is somebody who is extraordinary in his visionary thinking,” Page told The Blues Mag in 2015. “He might explain that he’s here in modern times, but he’s actually four stops further on down the road. He thinks so far ahead you can only marvel.”

The White Stripes - White Blood Cells (Sympathy for the Record Industry, 2001)

Jack White and drummer/ex-wife Meg White might still have been small-timers when they entered Memphis’ Easley-McCain Recording Studio in February 2001, but the bandleader had a master plan for White Blood Cells.

The straight-blues direction and slavish covers of the band’s earliest work were ditched for 16 White-penned compositions. More significant, while all around him adopted the sexless sheen of Pro Tools, the bandleader insisted on analogue grit and impulse tracking, rattling through the songs at whip-cracking pace (they didn’t even bother with a bass track).

“There were probably only three days of recording,” White told Detroit Metro Times, “We really rushed the whole album, to get that feel, a real tense thing coming out of it.”

“We just set up and they started going,” remembered engineer Stuart Sikes in the Detroit Free Press. “Jack knew what he wanted. He told me more than once not to make it sound too good. Basically, he wanted it as raw as possible, but better than if it was recorded in somebody’s living room. He steered me that way and I ran with it.”

The plan worked. Upon release in July 2001, nothing sounded quite like White Blood Cells. From scabrous smash-and-grabs like Dead Leaves And The Dirty Ground or Fell In Love With A Girl to campfire jangles like Hotel Yorba, these songs felt like sunbeams punching through storm clouds after years of malodorous nu metal. For once, the music press and the man in the pit were agreed: The White Stripes were it.

There are indie tastemakers who’ll string us up for overlooking Elephant, but this third album deserves the podium finish, announcing a world-beating talent and sweeping away the dross like a biblical flood. The band’s star would rise higher, but they never made a more exciting statement.

The White Stripes - Elephant (V2/XL, 2003)

The mighty Elephant trampled all-comers in 2003, giving The White Stripes their first UK No.1 album and the rock scene a new poster-boy. Recorded at London’s Toe Rag studio on equipment predating 1963, the record ram-raided the mainstream without compromising White’s vision one iota.

In 2003, its offcuts were everywhere, from the football casuals bellowing the riff of Seven Nation Army, to the rock clubs pumping out Ball And Biscuit, to the video that saw Kate Moss gyrating through I Just Don’t Know What To Do With Myself. The planet was theirs for the taking.

Jack White - Lazaretto (Third Man/XL/Columbia, 2014)

White’s solo return had an eccentric genesis, the guitarist alternating his all-male/female touring bands at sessions in Nashville, and rifling through lyrics he’d written as a 19-year-old for inspiration. If there was a whiff of pseudery, it evaporated when Lazaretto arrived in June 2014, delivering White’s most solid collection of songs since the Stripes.

Referencing the masters on the opening retread of Blind Willie McTell’s Three Women, White went on to spread his wings, evoking Exile-era Stones on Just One Drink and pulling the listener up short with the shiveringly personal Alone In My Home.

The White Stripes - De Stijl (Sympathy For The Record Industry, 2000)

De Stijl deserves its cult status, catching the duo at the tipping point before everything went batshit crazy. Dedicated to Blind Willie McTell, this second album was recorded to eight-track in White’s living room, but that rudimentary production belied a tracklisting that runs the gamut.

White was already the master of chippy, slide-driven blues, but patently had countless strings to his bow, as evidenced by the sugar-rush pop singalong of You’re Pretty Good Looking (For A Girl) or the plinky-plonk, Macca-worthy Apple Blossom. Impending greatness was writ large.

Jack White - Blunderbuss (Third Man/XL/Columbia, 2012)

A decade after White Blood Cells, there was a growing consensus that White had misplaced his mojo. In 2012, we ate our words and hats, with solo debut Blunderbuss darting between surf, country and honky-tonk, and remembering to throw a fistful of hooks at standouts like Sixteen Saltines and Missing Pieces.

Hitting No.1 in both the US and UK, Blunderbuss represented another adrenalin shot for the genre that White had helped to resurrect. “It’s all blues music to me,” he told us of the album’s light-footed approach. “It’s just different ways of projecting that. But the essence of all music to me is the blues.”

Jack White - Fear Of The Dawn (Third Man, 2022)

Silent as a solo artist for four years, White caught up with two albums in 2022 – and for our purposes, the fuzz-faced Fear Of The Dawn beats the dialled-down folk of Entering Heaven Alive.

Lead single and opener Taking Me Back is the bellwether and best track, its shredded octave-pedal stomp and synth squiggles nixing the lingering notion that White was a blues scholar preserved in aspic. From there, the highlights of this long, dark night of the soul keep landing, from the Who-style power chord smashes on Eosophobia to Shedding My Velvet’s stalking, small-hours confessional (‘This is the real me’).

The Raconteurs - Broken Boy Soldiers (V2/XL/Third Man, 2006)

The White Stripes were still a going concern when White ducked out for the first time, joining Brendan Benson, Jack Lawrence and Patrick Keeler for the alt-rock semi-supergroup’s best album.

Lead single Steady, As She Goes you already know, but should revisit, its funky lope, barb-wire guitar chop and breakneck chorus is still one of White’s best moments. That opener sets up a front-loaded album (the windmilling blue-denim rock of Hands and the itchy, weird Led Zeppelin III-ish title track are poles apart but both brilliant). After the Kinks-y Intimate Secretary and Together’s sundown strum, things sag.

The White Stripes - Get Behind Me Satan (V2/XL/Third Man, 2005)

White’s lo-fi leanings came back to bite him on the Stripes’ fifth album, which was recorded to eight-track tape at his Detroit home with microphones shorting out as water dripped through the ceiling (“It was torture,” he told The LA Times. “It got to the point where I was almost feeling, ‘Let’s forget it. I can’t take it anymore’”).

Satan’s release wasn’t smooth sailing, either, some fans feeling White could ease up on the piano, marimba and lyrical nods to Rita Hayworth. But at its best – the alleycat yowl of Blue Orchid, Instinct Blues’s scream-to-a-snarl and the undeniable My Doorbell – this was potent stuff.

The White Stripes - Icky Thump (Warner Bros./Third Man, 2007)

Jack ‘n’ Meg bowed out with a glittering swansong that ensured their legacy was bulletproof. Icky Thump fused White’s restless experimentation to some of his most rock-solid tunes.

The pianos were gone, and we didn’t miss them: Conquest was a crazed spaghetti-western scorcher, and Catch Hell Blues a showcase for White’s stunning electric slide work, while You Don’t Know What Love Is (You Just Do As You’re Told) was a scream-it-back anthem. Always leave them hungry, runs the adage. After Icky Thump, we were ravenous

...and one to avoid

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The Dead Weather - Dodge And Burn (Third Man, 2015)

In the history of pointless and perverse ideas, taking one of the scene’s most visceral frontman-guitar players and planting him on the drumstool is right up there.

The songs on this third Dead Weather release aren’t awful, and White gets a sniff of the microphone on three of the best: the spooky, synthy hip-rock of Three Dollar Hat, Rough Detective’s chippy nose-to-nose with Alison Mosshart and the punch-out-your-lights punk-rocker Open Up (That’s Enough). But those highlights aside, it could be anyone thumping away back there – and it’s hard to imagine many White fans willing the collective back from hiatus.

Artists

Henry Yates has been a freelance journalist since 2002 and written about music for titles including The Guardian, The Telegraph, NME, Classic Rock, Guitarist, Total Guitar and Metal Hammer. He is the author of Walter Trout's official biography, Rescued From Reality, a music pundit on Times Radio and BBC TV, and an interviewer who has spoken to Brian May, Jimmy Page, Ozzy Osbourne, Ronnie Wood, Dave Grohl, Marilyn Manson, Kiefer Sutherland and many more.