The Black Keys just can’t catch a break at the minute.
Last month, the garage-rock band’s entire North American arena tour was cancelled without explanation. The duo then said that the shows would be rescheduled in smaller venues.
Fans began to speculate that the arena tour’s failure was the result of terrible ticket sales, with some fans even sharing screenshots of hugely unsold ticket inventory. Many noted that the unexpectedly high prices likely contributed to the poor ticket sales too.
And following the tour fiasco, The Black Keys have fired their managers.
A new feature in The New York Times about high-profile tour cancellations revealed that the duo had parted ways with Irving Azoff and Steve Moir. A representative for Azoff told Billboard it was an “amicable parting.”
Azoff is the chairman of Full Stop Management, and is known in the music industry for his work with The Eagles, Van Halen, Steely Dan, and many other iconic rock acts.
The Black Keys were always unlikely to sell out arenas in their current form. It’s a decade now since their career peak at the turn of the 2010s, when they scored three top 3 albums on the US Billboard 200: 2010’s Brothers, 2011’s El Camino, and 2014’s Turn Blue.
Their most recent album, Ohio Players, only made it to #26 in the US earlier this year, making it their lowest-charting album in their home country since 2006 (Magic Potion). Ohio Players fared little better in Australia, reaching #68 on the ARIA Albums Chart.
Critical reviews of The Black Keys’ latest were also decidedly mixed. Slant even went so far as to accuse one album track, “Beautiful People (Stay High)” as sounding as if it was AI-generated. The Guardian, meanwhile, called Ohio Players an “underwhelming diffusion of the band’s once heady magic.”
At the time of writing, The Black Keys haven’t responded to requests for comment.
