Jack White

An upholstery apprenticeship, then a two-piece

John Anthony Gillis was born in Detroit on 9 July 1975. He started on drums in first grade and picked up the guitar during a three-year upholstery apprenticeship, a trade that fixed his working habit: a small set of tools, hard limits, everything finished by hand. He married Meg White in 1996, and the pair formed the White Stripes in 1997 — two players, a red-and-white-and-black colour scheme, and a deliberately short list of things they were allowed to do.

The restriction paid. White Blood Cells, released in 2001, carried them out of the Detroit bar circuit and made them the band everyone reached for when describing the garage-rock revival. Two years later Elephant arrived, and "Seven Nation Army" left music altogether for football terraces, where it still lives. The duo stopped in 2011, announcing that the split was "mostly to preserve what is beautiful and special about the band". There was no falling-out and no farewell tour.

The parallel careers

Almost none of White's work since has been solo in the ordinary sense. He founded Third Man Records in 2001; it now runs shops and studios in Nashville, Detroit and London, and every record he has made under his own name has come out on it. He co-founded the Raconteurs with Brendan Benson in 2005 and the Dead Weather in 2009, and both have kept resurfacing rather than properly ending.

His first album under his own name, Blunderbuss, topped charts in 2012. Lazaretto followed in 2014 and broke vinyl sales records, which suited a label owner who had spent a decade arguing for the format. He has won twelve Grammy Awards from 33 nominations.

No Name, and the habit of not announcing things

The current run of work starts with No Name, thirteen tracks put out on 19 July 2024 with no title on the sleeve, no song names and no press release. Third Man simply slipped plain white vinyl into customers' bags at its Nashville and Detroit shops, with a note encouraging whoever got one to rip it and put it online. Reviewers who caught up with it a few days later described the loudest, most direct record White had made away from the White Stripes, closer to Iggy Pop and Led Zeppelin than to the arranged, keyboard-heavy solo albums that preceded it.

The method carried over. When the next record came, White again made no formal statement about it — it turned up as a pre-order on the Third Man site.

Frozen Charlotte

Two new songs, "G.O.D. and the Broken Ribs" and "Derecho Demonico", appeared together on a tri-colour 7" in early April 2026, and White played both on Saturday Night Live on 4 April with Jack Black hosting. "Dollar Bill" followed on 10 June. The album they came from, Frozen Charlotte, was released on 10 July 2026: thirteen tracks, 42 minutes and 36 seconds, self-produced at Third Man Studio in Nashville with Patrick Keeler on drums, Dominic Davis on bass and Bobby Emmett on keys. It is the first time White has made two consecutive solo albums with the same band, and they cut it straight off the back of a tour. "Sometimes right in the middle of the set, we'd start playing something new," he said of the writing. "That was born on stage."

The title refers to a sculpture White made — a skull mounted on a Frozen Charlotte, the small penny doll named after a folk ballad about a girl who freezes to death on the way to a dance. The record reached number 32 on the Billboard 200, number one on the Billboard Independent Albums chart and number 29 in the UK, and holds a Metacritic score of 83.

Critics mostly took it as the sequel No Name implied. Rolling Stone called it White's most sustained maximalist-garage studio party since Elephant and gave it four stars, as did Mojo; Uncut went to four and a half. NME was the dissenting voice at three and a half, arguing it lacks the fire and variety of its predecessor and that some tracks get lost in the sludge.

Where he stands now

The White Stripes were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame at the Peacock Theater in Los Angeles on 8 November 2025. Iggy Pop introduced them. Olivia Rodrigo and Feist played "We're Going to Be Friends" and Twenty One Pilots took on "Seven Nation Army". Meg White did not attend; Jack, in a red suit, black shirt and white tie, told the room she was sorry she could not make it and grateful to the people who had supported her, and said she had helped write the speech he then delivered — a short parable about a girl who climbs an oak tree and finds her brother in it.

The 2026 tour was announced in April, with tickets on sale from 17 April, and runs to 35 dates. The first North American leg opened at The Anthem in Washington DC on 10 July and finished at Pine Knob Music Theatre in Clarkston, Michigan on 25 July. August and early September went to the UK and Ireland: two nights at London's Eventim Apollo on 25 and 26 August, then Bristol, Newcastle, Belfast and two nights at Dublin's 3Olympia on 1 and 2 September. The second North American leg began at the Fillmore in San Francisco on 23 September and runs through Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Austin, Nashville, Minneapolis, Pittsburgh and Miami Beach before finishing with two nights in Atlanta in November. Several cities get double nights; Philadelphia is missing from the itinerary entirely.

What happens in the room

Every show on this tour is phone-free. Audiences hand over their devices in Yondr pouches at the door and go through bag checks on the way in, and the staging is built to match — flashing lights and very little else, no large video screens, no between-song speeches of any length.

The Brooklyn Paramount show on 11 July ran nineteen songs across roughly two hours, with the Providence punk band Downtown Boys playing an hour beforehand. The reviewer for mxdwn noted a multi-generational general-admission crowd and that the White Stripes songs — "Hotel Yorba", "Black Math", "Cannon", "Icky Thump" — drew the loudest reactions of the night. At the sold-out Eventim Apollo on 25 August, White went on at 9pm and came off at 10.45pm having played 27 songs, opening with an instrumental jam into "That's How I'm Feeling" and taking in Hank Williams, Rosetta Howard and a reading of "Jolene" for Dolly Parton, his first performance of the song since 2007. MetalTalk's verdict was that he "most certainly still has the fire and the commitment to pull it all off"; XS Noize called the set a guitar masterclass and noted that around a third of it came from Frozen Charlotte and No Name.