From their multi-platinum peaks to their sad, desperate lows, the Red Hot Chili Peppers have always aspired toward a humble goal: to make you feel like you’re in the practice space with them, zoning out and goofing around, watching three exceptionally talented musicians and their extremely jacked singer spitballing ideas and keeping each other entertained. It’s an intimate bond that has fostered an intense connection among their fans. But it’s also opened them up for harsh scrutiny. When a relationship is built on these simple pleasures—jammin’ and rappin’ and slappin’ the bass, cramming your lyrics with cartoonish sex talk and rock history allusions, calling your reunion album Unlimited Love and really meaning it—it’s easy to feel you’ve outgrown it.
If audiences have sometimes felt that way, imagine how John Frusciante must feel. He first joined the Chili Peppers in the late 1980s, a teenage virtuoso helping shape his favorite group’s horned-up funk-rock into something more melodic. He quit in 1992 while touring their commercial breakthrough Blood Sugar Sex Magik, then returned in 1998 as the mystical, fragile heart of their most fruitful period. Even if you don’t like the band, you can at least acknowledge that his inventive solos, layered vocal harmonies, and wide-ranging influences have always been attempts to make the music more artful and ambitious (or, at the very least, more like the Cure).
Unlimited Love—the Chili Peppers’ first album in six years and first with Frusciante in 16—recaptures their natural camaraderie. At once live-sounding and restrained, it’s Frusciante’s first record with the band where none of the songs sound remotely like anything on mainstream radio, which maybe speaks more to the times than the group’s efforts. The last time Frusciante recorded with them, on 2006’s double album Stadium Arcadium, their riffy, pile-driving anthems felt at home alongside hits by fellow, enduring Gen X peers like Foo Fighters and Green Day. On Unlimited Love, which arrives nearly 40 years into the band’s career and makes no concessions to any prevailing trends of popular music in 2022, the Chili Peppers sound like no one but themselves.
In fact, they sound a lot like themselves. After testing the waters with replacement guitarist Josh Klinghoffer, who debuted on 2011’s I’m With You, and new collaborator Danger Mouse, who produced 2016’s The Getaway, the goal here is to act like no time has passed, settling back into their old magic and maybe finding some winners to slot between the hits in their live set. Grungy first single “Black Summer” and glittery funk throwback “She’s a Lover” should do the trick, but even mid-tempo cuts like “Bastards of Light” find satisfying payoffs from the moody, patient songcraft they attempted during their tentative past decade in the wilderness. As for the lyrics, there’s a song that seems to be about traffic in Los Angeles; another about how good the music was in the ’70s. There are some veiled references to aging and grief and climate change. There’s a chorus that promises (threatens?) that Anthony Kiedis’ “aquatic mouth dance is waiting for you”; there’s another where he argues how cool it would be if the great apes could roam free.