You Deserve Love

Editors’ Notes “The best compliment I think we ever get is: We play music that sounds timeless,” White Reaper’s Ryan Hater tells Apple Music. “There’s a classic nature to guitar-driven music.” On the obvious strength of 2017’s exquisitely titled The World’s Best American Band, the Louisville, Kentucky, outfit became the perfect counter to the claim that rock’s dead and gone. You Deserve Love, their major-label debut, boasts all the verve and romance of a well-kept Trans Am, for a generation of listeners who’d probably opt for a Tesla instead. From the delirious bounce of “Saturday” to the corkscrewing coda of “Headwind,” White Reaper sound less like revivalists here and more like themselves, punks who’ve come of age as songwriters and musicians. “The producer—Jay Joyce—he was really stoked to work with a raw rock band,” guitarist Hunter Thompson says. “He wanted to get it as live as possible, to get the natural elements of us playing together, to keep the magic. We would beg him to let us redo takes because we’d mess something up. But we took it and let it be. It’s as raw as it ever was: us five playing our five instruments and that’s really it.”