Jack White is no stranger to Saturday Night Live. The Detroit-born Rock and Roll Hall of Famer who made Nashville home base for himself and his label Third Man Records became eligible for membership in the show’s Five-Timers Club with his appearance as musical guest back in 2023. (That is, if you count his 2002 appearance as one-half of The White Stripes.) Right on the heels of the Good Friday release of his first two new solo singles since his surprise-dropped 2024 LP No Name, White and his band rolled up to 30 Rockefeller Plaza again on Saturday.
The broadcast also marked Jack Black’s fifth time hosting SNL, and his opening monologue morphs into a sketch about the Five-Timers gag, which has been running since 1990. I’ll avoid spoilers in case you haven’t watched it yet, but there are a heap of cameos including Tina Fey, Candice Bergen (!) and Jack White.
For his two performances, White is joined by the small group of kickass players who backed him up on his shows around No Name. By name, that’s keyboard wiz Bobby Emmett, bassman Dominic Davis and Raconteurs drummer Patrick Keeler. Onstage, the quartet is surrounded by color-coded plastic shipping palettes. Behind White is a larger-than-life-size model of the curious figure who appears in the single artwork — an alabaster white humanoid who gives off a slight R. Crumb vibe, whose hands are in the pockets of their bell-bottoms and whose head is an oversized blue skull.
The two new songs put their own spin on No Name’s blues-rocking back-to-basics approach. “Derecho Demonico,” played first, rides on a menacing start-stop riff. The lyrics take a page from old-school blues and hip-hop as White chides someone for “starting something they cannot finish,” while he also brags about obtaining status symbols (“A brand-new truck / Three-tone, custom-made”) that those who’ve underestimated him would not expect him, “a man who never made the grade,” to possess.
Follow-up “G.O.D. and the Broken Ribs” is in a similar vein to his catalog classic “Lazaretto,” imagining an extreme scenario and pondering how it could play out. In this case, said scenario is restarting human society after an apocalyptic event, but having to do it while carrying the baggage (emotional, societal, technological) of having lived through the mess humans have got ourselves in today.
There’s no indication just yet as to whether these songs are loosies or are a prelude to a forthcoming bigger release from White and company. Keep an eye on White’s Instagram profile and Third Man’s website for updates. Via the site (as well as Third Man’s storefronts in Nashville, Detroit and London), you can also pick up the 7-inch vinyl single with these two songs. It’ll also appear at other mom-and-pop shops next week ahead of Record Stord Day (though it is not an RSD-exclusive release).
