10 Bands That Ended Their Careers On A High Note

The whole mindset behind the White Stripes was always about doing more with less. Standing as just Jack and Meg White, every single album seemed like an experiment to see just how much emotion can be brought out of just two people working with the bare essentials. After going for their usual bluesy sounds though, things got a lot weirder once the effects started to get brought in.

While Jack had started working with some off kilter sounds all the way back on records like White Blood Cells, Icky Thump is the culmination of the band's experimentation brought to its wildest conclusion, with the title track's whammy pedal solo and weird organ lines setting the tone for what the rest of the record has to offer. Across every song, Jack seems to try and contort his instrument into whatever sound he can, almost making it sound like a trumpet at the beginning of the song Conquest.

This is still a White Stripes record though, and half of the appeal comes from the personality from both Jack and Meg, as Jack wears his heart on his sleeve on tracks like A Martyr For My Love For You and then immediately switches to making weird character portraits on songs like Rag and Bone. Jack would end up taking a lot of this whacked out energy into his solo career, but the camaraderie with his "little sister" Meg was something that will have to stay in rock history for the time being.