Carney had a simple explanation for why the Black Keys put the band on pause at their commercial peak. “We said yes to too many things,” he said. “It’s hard when you’ve played so many shows for a hundred bucks or less, and then you get offers for literally 10,000 times that to play a show — you can’t rationalize saying no. But it pulls you further away from what you actually want to do, which is make music. You start forgetting that you’re actually in control of what you can and can’t do. Which is the whole point of why we wanted to be in a band.”

Auerbach added that touring had come to overshadow the duo’s primary goal, songwriting. “We like creating the songs. And I know you can’t have your cake and eat it too — we’ve got to go perform them,” he said. “But it’s not a good feeling to work so hard to do the thing you love and just not ever be able to get to create. It can be maddening.”

This year, the Black Keys signed on for — and then quickly pulled out of — Woodstock 50, the now-embattled anniversary festival that may take place in mid-August. “We realized that we didn’t want our first show back to be in front of 150,000 people in a field without any control,” Carney said. “We almost gave our agent a heart attack. We hadn’t made any money in almost five years and we got offered, like, $1.5 million. And we told him we don’t want it. We only want to do stuff that actually is going to be enjoyable.”

Auerbach, 40, and Carney, 39, grew up in the same neighborhood in Akron, Ohio, and started experimenting as teenagers with noise rock, punk and psychedelic jams on four-track recorders. They officially formed the Black Keys in 2001, playing basic, stomping blues-rock that they went on to merge with other pre-punk styles: glam, rockabilly, Southern soul, garage rock, hard rock.