White Denim
16th March 2025

White Denim, one of the very best rock bands to emerge this millennium, have gone through rapid changes in the 2020s, and now open an exciting new chapter with the wondrous album, ‘12’, which arrives rich in hot tunes and fresh invention.

It’s always been hard to keep pace with James Petralli’s group, ever since they first exploded out of Austin, Texas in ’08 with hyper-kinetic post-punk bangers like Shake Shake Shake and I Start To Run. There was delicious romance in the original trio’s MO, as they hatched intrepid sounds together in a 1940s Spartan trailer parked up in woodland outside the city. James duly raced on through shifting line-ups and kaleidoscopic shades of soul, jazz and Southern rock, always with a feel of in-the-moment authenticity.

As for so many musicians, the pandemic forced Petralli into a radical rethink in both life and creative process. Going into White Denim’s twelfth long-player, he relocated his family to Los Angeles, and, barred from the usual workouts “on the floor” under COVID, he plunged deep into the science of assembling tracks digitally, with contributions from players he’d sometimes never even meet.

The results on ‘12’ are intricate, hi-tech and forward-facing, yet also somehow still of a piece with the questing ambition, rootsy swing and uplifting way with melody we’ve come to adore about Petralli’s music.

“It was out of the window with even the idea of a band,” says James, speaking from the converted one-car garage adjoining his Pasadena residence which now serves as White Denim’s HQ. “On this record, there are many bands, sometimes in the room with me, sometimes miles away in a remote collaboration, and that process opened up a lot of possibility for me.”

By way of example, he explains how he heard a track by Chicago’s Finom (aka Macie Stewart and Sima Cunningham), then speculatively reached out to them, and soon had them voicing on ‘12’’s sun-kissed soul smash, ‘Swinging Door’.

“It was like, I don’t have the budget to fly them to Los Angeles or Austin, or to get myself to Chicago,” Petralli laughs, “but let’s see what they send back. Suddenly, there was no barrier: if I feel like, there’s a great drummer in New York who I want to hear on a particular song, let’s see what he does, too! Then, there’s another great drummer somewhere else: why not have four of them on a song at once? Or, I’m hearing strings on a track, and I don’t want to represent them on a synthesizer… I definitely indulged in some extravagant personnel choices.”