There's a version of the Black Lips story where they never leave Atlanta, never grow up, never stop throwing up on themselves at SXSW — and that version is fine, honestly, it's a good story. But Trans-Allegheny is a different story entirely.
The Setup
The record was cut in 2017 with producer Sean Lennon, which is either the most surprising or the most obvious pairing depending on how you squint at it. Lennon brought the band into Electric Lady Studios in New York — that room, that history, Hendrix's room — and let them be weird in a more expensive way than they'd been weird before. The results are slouched psychedelia, still greasy, still dragging a boot through the mud, but with a kind of Technicolor patience that their earlier records never bothered with.
Jared Swilley and Cole Alexander are still at the center of it, trading guitar duties and harmonies that sound like they learned to sing by listening to AM radio through a broken speaker. That's not a complaint. That blown-out vocal texture is load-bearing on a record like this.
The Sessions
What Lennon understood — and what the production reflects — is that the Black Lips are not a band you clean up. You put a better microphone in front of the mess. Engineer Shawn Everett, who'd just come off A Seat at the Table with Solange and would go on to work with The War on Drugs, is behind the board here, and his fingerprints are all over the midrange warmth that makes the record feel three-dimensional without ever feeling polished.
Everett has talked about treating rooms like instruments. On Trans-Allegheny, you can feel that philosophy in the way the drums breathe — there's air around the kit that their earlier lo-fi recordings never had, and it changes everything about how the songs land.
The title track, sitting just past the midpoint, is probably the finest thing the band has ever recorded. It's unhurried in a way that feels almost radical for them, built on a guitar figure that circles and circles without resolving, and the vocal sits on top like something half-remembered. You will want to play it twice.
The Record Itself
"Can't Hold On" opens the thing like a Stones song that got left in a hot car, and "Highlife" leans into a West African guitar influence that shouldn't work but absolutely does — Cole Alexander has always been a more curious player than the band's reputation suggested, and here that curiosity gets real room to stretch.
This is an album that rewards late listening. Not background music, not party music. Pour something cold, let the room get quiet, and let it find you.