“Busy” doesn’t quite do The Black Keys’ Dan Auerbach and Patrick Carney justice. “Busy” implies that there’s things that need to be done. A handful of side and solo projects, a collaborative rap album, a slew of production work for artists big and small, a twitter feud with Justin Beiber — you could argue none of these things really needed to be done, especially by a group as commercially successful as these guys, but here they are — almost 15 years, 10-plus shared albums and millions of dollars later, still busy restless as ever.
The latest example: Dan Aurbach’s new side project, The Arcs. That’s their video for the song “Outta My Mind” below, and it’s expectedly weird, albeit in kind of refreshing way. Bathed in film grain with a swirling backdrop of hyper-colored animals and the like, the video showcases The Arcs — Auerbach, Leon Michaels, Richard Swift, Homer Steinwess and Nick Movshon — ambling through a psychedelic spin on Auerbach’s songwriting-by-numbers approach. The whole thing’s pretty innocuous, save a Worldstar-esque fight clip right in the middle, but it’s nice to see/hear a version of Auerbach that isn’t clamoring for Top 40 ubiquity.
The Arcs’ debut album Yours, Dreamily is out now on Nonesuch Records.
This article appears in Sep 3-9, 2015.

