Jack White’s Fear of the Dawn Deftly Balances Experimentalism and Melodicism

Jack White is known and loved as much for his strictly defined animating principles as he is for his voice and iconic guitar playing. He’s the analog warrior forever decrying the soullessness of the digital revolution—a man out of time committed to replicating the primacy of the archaic blues and Detroit garage rock that inspired the White Stripes.

Since launching his solo career a decade ago, however, White has shown increasing willingness to break free of those once self-imposed strictures, using expensive guitars and embracing a much broader musical palette. This was particularly evident on 2018’s Boarding House Reach, where he piled on the overdubs and smashed often incongruent tempos, riffs, and genres together with wild abandon. And the results weren’t always pretty.

The first of two albums that White plans to release this year, Fear of the Dawn is in some ways just as far removed from the asceticism of his early work, with its studio-enhanced guitar effects, improvisational flair, and pronounced hip-hop and prog-metal influences. And like its predecessor, it often sounds like a collection of riffs that were quickly strung together in the studio. This time, though, White seems more willing to edit himself and counterbalance experimentalism with melodicism.

That is, except for the album’s first two tracks, “Taking Me Back” and “Fear of the Dawn.” With their big, dumb, hyper-processed guitars and grating, blustering vocals, they come close to resembling the ugly early-2000s nü-metal to which the White Stripes were hailed as an antidote at the time. They’re also two of the most conventional songs on the album, plowing ahead from point A to point B with little to no change in dynamics.

For the most part, the weirder White gets on Fear of the Dawn, the better. Outside of those first five disconcerting minutes, he remains committed to ensuring that even his most outlandish ideas are synthesized into effective earworms. “Hi-De-Ho,” for instance, assembles a Cab Calloway sample, guest verses by Q-Tip, and a meditative acoustic interlude and somehow manages to make it cohere, thanks in large part to its infectious bassline.

Much of Fear of the Dawn finds White acting as a sort of mad scientist. He played many of the instruments himself, with a few cameos from old friends like drummer Daru Jones, Raconteurs and Dead Weather bassist Jack Lawrence, and singer-songwriter Olivia Jean, whom White wed on stage in a surprise ceremony at a hometown Detroit concert last week.

The words often seem like an afterthought, and for a usually compelling lyricist like White, there are some absolute whoppers here, “At night, there is no light.” But he does more than enough talking with his guitar to make up for it. The ever-morphing “Eosophobia,” two versions of which appear on Fear of the Dawn, squeezes in practically an entire album’s worth of propulsive, multi-tonal riffs. Conversely, he hits on a crowd-pleasingly fuzzed-out sound on “What’s the Trick?” and wisely just rides it out for three-and-a-half minutes—a fitting accompaniment to one of the grittiest vocal performances he’s ever recorded.

After having spent a few years now indulging in his most extreme eccentricities, White ends Fear of the Dawn with two songs that suggest that he might have sufficiently expelled some of them. “Morning, Noon and Night” thumps along on a midtempo organ and guitar riff, while “Shedding My Velvet” is a silky slow blues number reminiscent of the Raconteurs’s “Blue Veins.” An entire album of similar songs might have felt like a retread. But on Fear of the Dawn, they’re rewards for experiencing something very rare: a long-established artist intent on pushing boundaries further than he ever has before.