On July 19, shoppers at Jack White’s Third Man Records in Nashville, Detroit, and London were surprised with the gift of a vinyl record with their purchase, labelled with only the words “No Name” on the otherwise blank packaging – no artwork, no track information, no recording credits. The mysterious wax turned out to be a full-length LP, his sixth solo album. A vinyl rip of the album quickly appeared on Reddit and YouTube. (White encouraged fans to share it widely, though they were going to anyway.) Two weeks later, Third Man announced the self-produced album’s official release, along with all the missing details, and confirmed its title was No Name.

With no name comes no distractions. The music speaks for itself, and the message is clear: LP number six is White’s roaring return to fiery garage-punk blues, a white-knuckled rush of rock n roll gluttony that’s to the point with no highfalutin artistic designs. His last three solo albums found him drifting further and further from the fundamentals of simplicity he always championed. Drawing inspiration from hip hop and electronic music, his songs became more experimental, more collage-like.

Backed by players including bassist Dominic David and drummer and Raconteurs bandmate Patrick Keeler, White sounds more energized and ferocious than he has in years. Hear the fuzzed-out charger “Bombing Out,” the clobbering “Bless Yourself,” the start-stop rev of “Missionary,” and the burning hot straight shot chorus of “Number One with a Bullet.” No Name is loaded with hellhound wails at White’s most impassioned, like on the seismic slide guitar stomper “It’s Rough on Rats (If You’re Asking).” Featuring No Name’s most minimalist drumming, the crashing, bashing “That’s How I’m Feeling,” on which the Black Belles’ Olivia Jean (who’s also White’s wife) plays bass, is the album’s closest semblance of a pure White Stripes song.

In case you haven’t already figured, for old school Jack White fans, No Name is the album they’ve been clamouring for since the White Stripes broke up in 2007, and it overdelivers. Pound for pound, No Name is rawer and heavier than any album he’s put out alone or with any of his bands, mixing the stripped-down immediacy of the White Stripes, the high-octane classic rock grandeur of the Raconteurs, and the dark grit of the Dead Weather.

No Name is such a torrential outpour of fevered rock n roll, it could take several listens to tell the songs apart. But the best way to enjoy it is to just dive right in, over and over again. (I myself have listened to No Name at least five times a day since it hit the internet.) And once the songs become identifiable, once they all click on their own, they become some of the most memorable earworms White’s written in years. With this vitalic, all-in return to his punk roots, No Name proves to fans who’ve felt alienated by his increasingly experimental albums of the last six years that he’s never lost it; he just does what he wants, when he wants, and he’ll create a whole lot of word-of-mouth buzz when he does it.

order No Name by Jack White HERE