El Camino boasts a no-nonsense brilliance: The pace is fast, the mood is upbeat, the choruses unfailingly addictive.

A band already at the top of its game has gotten even better.

"This record is more straight ahead rock and roll - raw, driving, and back to basics," says Auerbach. As Carney has put it, The Black Keys "respect the past while being in the present," and that formula has made them sound like nothing less than the future of rock and roll. While the largely self-produced ‘Brothers’, recorded at the famed Muscle Shoals Studio in Alabama, had a more soul and blues-oriented sound, ‘El Camino’ often recalls the blitzkrieg-paced British-style rock of the 1960s and 70s, post-Beatles and pre-punk: artists like T-Rex and The Sweet, along with the heavier swing of such bands as Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath. The references are there, but the sound is very much contemporary and utterly their own, equally informed by The Black Keys' passion for hip hop and R&B and bolstered by the atmospheric production approach of Danger Mouse (aka Brian Burton), who was behind the boards for 2008's ‘Attack & Release’ and collaborated with them on the funky ‘Tighten Up’ for ‘Brothers’. As Auerbach notes, "Brian understands all the different kinds of music we're into. He's got really great ideas about melody and song structure. For him it's all about the song." Also rejoining them is consistently innovative mixing engineer Tchad Blake, who Auerbach calls "a genius with audio, a complete wizard".

1 Lonely Boy
2 Dead And Gone
3 Gold On The Ceiling
4 Little Black Submarines
5 Money Maker
6 Run Right Back
7 Si
8 Hell Of A Season
9 Stop Stop
10 Nova Baby
11 Mind Eraser