A winner of a Grammy for Best Rock Song, its almighty riff has been adopted as sport’s unofficial anthem and called the “second-best-known guitar phrase in popular music” (after (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction).
From the Queen of England to the hounds of hellīut it’s Seven Nation Army, the album’s opener and lead single, that overshadowed the album as a whole to quickly become the band’s signature song. Their cultivated minimalist ethos extended to recording the record in just over two weeks in London’s Toe Rag Studio, where none of the equipment was manufactured after 1963: the liner notes proclaim that “no computers were used during the writing, recording, mixing and mastering of this record.”Ĭontrasts abound as the album stretches out: where The Hardest Button To Button’s clever riff is a perfectly formed, precision-tooled earworm (with Michel Gondry’s video turning its rhythm into a playful stop-motion-style movie), Little Acorn is a slab of dumb-downed edge-of-breakdown riffery ushered in by a self-help story about a determined squirrel: “Give it a whirl, be like the squirrel,” White urges us, before Girl, You Have No Faith In Medicine’s stuttering killswitch-mimicking solo offers a final shot of his relentless, manic lead style. But while their sound veered restlessly between twee and childlike and punitive and punky, it was always more about what they left out than what they added in. On their fourth album and first for a major label, The White Stripes distilled all of the elements of their raw and electrifying combination of punk, blues and garage-rock into 14 shots of dark spirit that became their definitive statement.ĭriven by minimalist drums, the manic yelp of angst in Jack White’s voice and the unpredictable menace of an extraordinary palette of visceral guitar sounds, this time ’round the duo adorned their sound with the addition of piano, keyboards, extra vocals, harmony parts, White’s archtop-plus-Whammy masquerading as bass, and a tendency towards the weird.
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