Jack White is one of the 21st century’s great rock conceptualists. He came to fame as the leader of the White Stripes, the Detroit-based garage-punk duo who unexpectedly became one of the biggest rock acts of the 2000s. The White Stripes established White as a roots rocker — he made sure they covered blues chestnuts from Son House — to such a degree that his modernist art instincts were somewhat overshadowed during the band’s peak. These duelling, sometimes complementary, instincts fuelled White’s myriad artistic pursuits both within and beyond the confines of the White Stripes. Almost immediately after White Blood Cells gave the duo a blockbuster in 2001, he started working outside of the group, producing Loretta Lynn’s Van Lear Rose and forming the Raconteurs with Brendan Benson, as well as the Dead Weather with the Kills’ Alison Mosshart. Once the White Stripes called it a day in 2011, his voracious musical appetite and strict work ethic flourished, as White divided his time between his Third Man Records empire, the Raconteurs and Dead Weather, and a solo career that grew increasingly idiosyncratic with each album. Blunderbuss (2012) and Lazaretto (2014) stayed near the territory he covered with the White Stripes, but the proggy oddity of 2018’s Boarding House Reach didn’t prove to be a detour, as the twin 2022 albums Fear of the Dawn and Entering Heaven Alive proved: the noisy rock of the former was complemented by the quiet, introspective adventure of the latter. On 2024’s Grammy-nominated No Name, he reconnected with bluesy, high-octane rock — a path he continued with 2026’s Frozen Charlotte, which arrived a year after White’s induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.