Announced quietly, Jack White’s seventh solo record, ‘Frozen Charlotte’ is anything but stationary. It’s driven by White’s own agitation, built around ‘70s hard blues that is at its core, carefully selecting sounds and techniques from the DNA of classic rock’s finest and bringing it into the 21st century. It’s fun, cheeky, and swaggering, revelling in its own angst.
Does it reinvent the wheel? No. But it doesn't need to. Using the title's own metaphor, it leans into the sound White’s developed, dialled in and deconstructed over three decades, with his live band of Bobby Emmett, Patrick Keeler, and Dominic Davis in tow. The guitar speaks louder than the throughlines of human arrogance, existentialism, greed, and political anger, without losing its focus.
From the very start of the album, listeeners are welcomed into White’s blue-tinted world, as he proudly preaches “Welcome to the Garden of Eden”, laying down religious history in ‘G.O.D and the Broken Ribs’. Rewriting the Genesis myth of man and woman, with a nod to his own past (”We can’t live like a sister and a brother!”), the track explores corporeal fragility as Adam and Eve explore a post-apocalyptic world, juxtaposing divinity with the violence of a broken rib. In its twisted and urgent delivery, White turns an eye to the never-ending cycle of trying to start over again after our own missteps.
‘Raising the Grain’ continues the religious allegories, from turpentine being turned into red wine to its tongue-in-cheek carpentry focus. It’s heavy on distortion, a sound left deliberately unpolished; the garage-rock grain running through the track mirrors its own woodworking metaphor; the hardships listeners must endure to finally reach something polished and clear.
The album doesn’t hide its influences, culturally or musically, but instead wears them proudly, filtered through White’s sound. Keeler’s drums harken to Jon Bonham in ‘There’s Nobody There’, holding back the downbeat and letting a fill wander over the Jimmy Page-infused lead guitar where the ‘1’ should land. The rhythm feels like it’s still deciding where to plant its feet, emphasised even more in the swerve at the 1:40 mark into a completely different riff. It repeatedly twists and winds around White’s repeated refrain: “if you know me, you’ll never love me”.
‘Nobody Knows’ further explores this; its intro is built on the same start-stop, time-signature-shifting melody of Led Zeppelin’s ‘The Ocean’. Thematically, it takes an agnostic position as White critiques the human ego and how often it disguises our ignorance. Name-dropping Newton, Einstein, and Pythagoras, White questions the mysteries of existence, resigning to the fact that, as the title suggests, no one knows.
The record shifts register in its second half, trading cosmic and biblical scale for something more grounded. Instead of existentialism, White turns to the downfall of a relationship in ‘I Can’t Believe What I’m Hearing’. Guided by a pared-back drum-guitar groove centred around one repeated riff, it’s insistent and nagging, mirroring the spitting of lyrics “click clack, back track, tick tock, smack talk”, before opening into a dizzying wah-wah-heavy solo at the close.
The theme of human connection is explored again in the Page-esque ‘Thick As Thieves’, featuring White’s signature distorted yell. It leans fully into the groove, each repetition building into a wailing solo that embellishes on the simple core trio structure—fitting for a song about the tumultuous nature of an enabling partnership, who are, in the title’s own words, thick as thieves.
From the personal to the collective, ‘All Alone Again’ turns its pointed focus on greed, specifically reflecting the current political climate and how desire outweighs morality. White sings about burning down the haystack to find the needle, while the track, instrumentally, bites and thrashes, aiming at the superficial connections and destructive tendencies listeners often have, in an effort to find the easy way around things.
‘Making Contact’ and its repetitive, spoken (or more fittingly, shouted) word lyrics play on the slippage between 'making contact' and the line “making content”—a jab at how society’s collective attention has drifted towards media, and away from actual connection.
The closing track,‘Neighbors Blues’ , as its title suggests, is a blues-driven track through and through. The track's epic multi-part guitar solo stands as a testament to White’s mastery of the instrument—the moment where he sounds most like himself without the need for a word to be spoken. Whispering neighbours are mirrored in the echo laid over White’s own vocals, while progressive arpeggios combine with Emmett’s organ build and slowly evolve as the track quietens.
‘Frozen Charlotte’ isn’t White reinventing himself, so much as fortifying what already works; an album that trades the minimalism of the White Stripes for the raw urgency started in 2024's 'No Name', in his own words "a penny dreadful" but fully charged.
Megan-Louise Burnham
Image: 'Frozen Charlotte' Official Album Cover