Jack White: No Name review – terrific surprise album is his most White Stripes-esque solo release

Customers at Jack White’s Third Man Records shops in London, Nashville and Detroit, received a free gift with their purchases on Friday – a white-label vinyl album with a generic sleeve, titled “no name”. The record was not the work of the Chicago rapper, but rather a surprise release from White himself, available only to those lucky customers on that day. As yet, little information has surfaced about the album, but the Third Man Instagram account instructed owners to “Rip it”, and a number have duly distributed it across the internet so fans can hear this elusive music after only a little net-based detective work. (This guerilla release strategy calls to mind Sault releasing five albums of new material as a download in 2022, or Cindy Lee’s acclaimed triple album Diamond Jubilee, which they released this March and is only available as a free download from a Geocities website or as an ad-free YouTube stream.)

Why White chose to let his sixth solo album slip out in such a manner is anyone’s guess, but the man who’s done more than any other modern artist to revive record-collecting has form for such playfulness – he even went as far as to hide the 100 copies of the second single by side-project the Upholsterers within furniture reupholstered by bandmate Brian Muldoon, with whom White served an upholstery apprenticeship in his youth (only two copies have as yet been discovered). No Name will please both extremes of Jack White fandom: the diehard completists get another super-rare “holy grail” for their Discogs wantlists, while the fans who simply dig the music get 13 new songs they don’t even need to subscribe to streaming services to hear.

Whether via vinyl or dodgy MP3, every Jack White fan should search No Name out. It’s more off-the-cuff than much of White’s solo work – less of a curate’s egg than 2018’s occasionally inspired, occasionally bewildering Boarding House Reach, less slick and produced than 2022’s gonzo rock record Fear of the Dawn, more alive than its muted, folky twin Entering Heaven Alive.

White returns to the essence of his art, following the more grandiose experiments of recent years. And while those more baroque excursions yielded much of value, it’s in the rock’n’roll fundaments explored here that his true genius resides.

Put bluntly, No Name is a rock record – an incredibly satisfying one. It sounds more like the White Stripes than anything White has cut since that band’s demise – its 13 songs are driven by the blues, his playing sounding like the bastard son of Elmore James and Jimmy Page, swinging between bare-knuckled riffs and sweet slide-guitar with a switchblade edge. The instrumentation is pared back to only what matters, what’s necessary. The drumming often channels the magical primordial stomp of the sorely missed Meg White’s poetic, bone-simple playing.

The album is dark, heavy, thrilling, beautiful. The unforgiving second track (they’re all currently untitled) channels the bruising power of the first Shellac album and Led Zeppelin’s Presence, while the closing, 13th is heavy rock as vehicle for spiritual uplift. And it’s funny as hell, in the same breath as it is serious as a heart attack. That second track is a complex, seething, wry attack on modern-day narcissism, White howling “God-on-command / God-on-demand / If God’s too busy I’ll bless myself”, while on the fifth track, the Catholic-raised White breathes fire and brimstone, all hopped-up on the Old Testament and screaming: “Just like Joshua and the fabled walls of Jericho, I’m here to tear down the institution!” He sounds righteous, declamatory, unhinged, like Jerry Lee Lewis reborn as a rapper, sublime and ridiculous in just the right amounts. Track seven is a fantastic pop song, grumbling about modernity (“the truth’s become opinion these days”) and dropping indelible hooks and earworms in its wake – “What’s the rumpus? Will the label dump us?” is just one such irresistibly catchy flourish.

Related: ‘I thought I’d end up running an upholstery shop’: Jack White on the White Stripes, bar brawls and fame

Indeed, many of these tracks recapture White’s gift for heavy rock studded with hooks and a pop-oriented lightness of step. Perhaps freed from the creative pressure of a “proper” release, No Name finds White in revival mode, ditching the grand conceptual flourishes to go back to the source. Sounding leaner and sharper than he has for some time, this supposedly throwaway release is one of his very best.