JACK WHITE - FROZEN CHARLOTTE
On Jack White's seventh solo album (and nineteenth overall career album), Frozen Charlotte, longtime fans are treated to a garage rock sequel of sorts to 2024's excellent return-to-form LP, No Name. Once again employing a stripped down approach and a tight core of supporting musicians, Frozen Charlotte is in every respect an attempt to bottle the lightning of the frenetic live shows that White played throughout 2024-25 in support of No Name. With Raconteurs/Afghan Whigs' Patrick Keeler on drums, Dominic Davis on bass, and newest recruit Bobby Emmett on organ, this band has very much been road-hardened from the last two years of touring, so it should come as no surprise that the musical results are loose, spontaneous, and and on more than a few occasions, truly inspired.
The most significant departure from No Name can be found in White's songwriting and lyrical content. Not only is Frozen Charlotte his nineteenth career album, alas it is also the third divorce album of his career (hot on the heels of 2000's De Stijl and 2012's Blunderbuss). The news of his impending divorce from soon-to-be ex-wife Olivia Jean landed in conjunction with the press release for Frozen Charlotte --as they say, all press is good press. White's recent heartbreak is on plain display across all thirteen songs found here. Lead single "G.O.D. and the Broken Ribs" is probably the most optimistic song of the bunch, relaying an Adam and Eve tale with a garage rock backdrop, but the remaining song titles alone paint a pretty bitter picture ("There's Nobody There," "You'll Never Fix Me", "All Alone Again," and of course, "Dollar Bill"). Add to this the fact that White's mother passed away earlier this year, and it becomes easy to see why this is not the sunny, glass-half-full album that No Name was.
However, White has always wisely been able to turn lemons into lemonade (as he most notably did with Beyonce in 2016 on "Don't Hurt Yourself"), and he delivers once again on Frozen Charlotte. Several of the songs here are among the best of his solo career, most notably "Nobody Knows," "All Alone Again" and the genre-defying album-closer "Neighbors Blues," which hangs on little more than a hypnotic Hammond organ riff played on infinite loop by Emmett while White pontificates about nosey neighbours and their ill intentions for five minutes. In classic White form, the lyrics to this song were unassumingly slipped into the back of his Collected Lyrics & Selected Writing Volume 1 book that was released at the tail end of 2025.
When all is said and done, Frozen Charlotte is a worthy addition to the Jack White canon. While at times it may sound like a forty-minute tantrum from a middle-aged divorced man, after nineteen albums he surely has afforded himself the time and space to throw a fit. To quote a wise man, "we were born under a blue sky, but we've been alone since the day that we came home." In a world that is currently on fire, keep cool with Frozen Charlotte.
-Leks Maltby