The first question most Jack White fans are looking for an answer to when it comes to his new album, “Frozen Charlotte”: Is it effectively a “No Name 2.0”? Almost everyone expects a “yes” to that question. In his solo career, White spent a few years jumping back and forth, oscillating between acoustically oriented efforts and purely monster workouts, with wildly mixed reactions. Then came 2024’s “No Name,” one of the great modern rock ‘n’ roll records, satisfying roughly 99.2% of the fan base with a formula that amounted to something like “the White Stripes, but beefier and more muscular.” Rarely has a standom been more prepared to say: Please sir, can we have another one?.

So, to get to the point: Yes! “Frozen Charlotte” feels like a sequel… a sequel that people were really asking for. It couldn’t sound much more similar if White had gotten to work on this one the day after the “No Name” sessions wrapped, even if we know that’s not exactly the case or when it happened. Glory, hallelujah: you can now kiss the spin-off.

The sense of musical continuity is a welcome sight for fans who wanted to hear White continue to mine that same vein of intricate, swaggering blues-rock. But listen beneath the surface of all that mind-blowing work and some differences become evident, more in their attitude than the arrangements. Clearly stated, Jack White is angry. Like really angry about something. Admittedly, it can be hard to tell at times: even in his most cheerful or cheerful moments, he has a way of sounding like he’s in a state of turmoil. Then, of course, their music already sounded furious, on fundamentally fun albums like “No Name” and “Boarding House Reach.” But with “Frozen Charlotte” it’s like his psyche catches up. Whatever caused it, it’s not bad for the music, which is as compelling as it is forceful. He’s angry, and if anything, that’s going to make us angrier at the guy.

Why do you have to be upset? Well, some of the same things that have aroused the fury of rockers since the beginning of time, namely: a girl who has done him wrong, an inscrutable God, and the prying eyes of nosy outsiders. White alternates vexing existential questions about the very nature of existence (starting with the first single, “GOD and the Broken Ribs”) with minor complaints about a relationship gone very, very wrong (“You’ll Never Fix Me”). The settings range from the Garden of Eden to his own kitchen, which is invoked twice on this album as a place where unpleasant things happen. In other words, Sturm und Drang is both cosmic and domestic. But wherever the sense of chaos comes from, he’ll turn it into moshpits, whether he’s performing these songs on the road or simply inspiring you to bounce off the walls of your own living space. (You are angry about something too, right?)

As promised, it all comes out in the form of deliriously relentless rock ‘n’ roll, released in short, cathartic bursts. Among the 13 songs here, only one is longer than four minutes, and several hover around two and a half minutes. But White packs so much into each issue that none of them feel all that compact. It’s as if each one were as filling as a rich dessert… if a rich dessert were also capable of delivering powerful blows to the body.

If you know a little about rock history, you could imagine that White is basing his entire current aesthetic on Led Zeppelin’s “Heartbreaker,” which is a pretty solid rock on which to build one’s house. Just as Jimmy Page would have the rest of the band stand down so he could have a few precious seconds to unload a blast of pure, unleavened guitar, this is replicated on the first song here, the aforementioned “GOD and the Broken Ribs.” Except White is a little more democratic and economical about it: He takes the first two mini-solos between verses of this opening song, then lets bassist Dominic Davis, drummer Patrick Keeler, and Hammond organist Bobby Emmett take each solo for a few seconds when their turn comes. It sets the stage for a mo that is increasingly faster, and increasingly louder, but with an intelligent sense of dynamics and changes: tremendously “heavy” music that somehow manages to evince a light touch.

As good as it is, “GOD and the Broken Ribs” might actually be the weakest cut on the album, so if that one didn’t completely grab you when it came out as a teaser, make a date to dig deeper here. Things really start to take shape with the second number, “Derecho Demonico,” which begins with White offering a sort of classic blues boast: “Well, I came to you on the back of a tornado storm / You know I’ve got something up my sleeve, I guess you’ll just have to twist my arm.” The suggested arm twisting prompts an extended solo in which White’s guitar or voice (or both) passes through a kind of squawk box. Later, Emmett performs a Hammond organ solo marked by the kind of distortion that suggests Uriah Heep doing garage-rock. It’s blissfully exhausting and the album is just getting started.

“There’s Nobody There” begins with an intricate, winding riff, and then at 1:40 it assumes that you may have already gotten bored of that riff, so it’s time to introduce a completely different one as a bridge. Why not? Keeler’s drumhead couldn’t be tighter, unless it was White’s mind. The singer repeats “Well, if you know me, you’ll never love me” six times. The appearance of more organ solos by Emmett over twin guitars is just the bombardment needed to cut through the paranoia and loneliness in a song that alternates modesty with self-defensive accusations of deception and abandonment.

Some songs come out at once, like “You’ll Never Fix Me,” which has White’s guitar hitting the listener with jackhammer quarter notes while Keeler delivers fluid, contrasting drum fills. Not everything starts at an 11. “I Can’t Believe What I’m Hearing” begins with a nice, basic beat, not at all disgusting, before discovering the album’s “nice” chorus, that is, something you could imagine on a Ranconteurs record. And so it goes: the songs give in just enough to give you a moment’s rest, and then they pop back up in your face, like well-designed carnival attractions offering additional emotional content.

From time to time, White receives some social commentary, although less than you might guess from her Instagram. “Making Contact” morphs into the phrase “creating content” and continues with the album’s wildest, silliest rhyme: “Like JP Morgan or Rockefeller / Tell the world they shouldn’t worry about salmonella.” Or maybe that honor should be reserved for “Nobody Knows,” a song centered on agnosticism, which includes this classic couplet: “Well, is God making fun of us?… / You and me, Isaac, Albert, Pythagoras.” And this one: “From Neanderthals to Denisovans… / Are Homosapiens the future extraterrestrials?” There’s some welcome comic relief of that sort in the fact that White is able to joke around a bit with his wordplay when reflecting on the nature of the universe. Because when it comes to other songs that deal with matters closer to the heart, it seems as serious as a heart attack.

There’s an elephant in the room here, if you think most popular music is confessional to some extent, and that’s the divorce petition that White’s wife, Olivia Jean, filed shortly before the new album came out. Maybe it’s irrelevant. White has confessed in interviews (including one in Variety a few years ago) that when he sits down to write lyrics he is not interested in delving into his personal life. We could take his word for it, and besides, at least part of the new album was recorded long enough ago for Jean to be credited with playing bass on one track. But at the same time, the lyrics are so consistently about conflict and estrangement that you don’t get the impression that “Frozen Charlotte” would necessarily be an album someone would write on their honeymoon.

“So long, so long, I’m leaving,” White keeps repeating in “You’ll Never Fix Me.” “My love is broken, it’s inside your mind / Just because I don’t speak doesn’t make me care / Talk to your friends that you’ll never fix me / Just shoot and you’ll miss me.” And: “See you later, now I’m screaming ’cause I’m gone / Son, you can fix the sheets in the morning / I’m tired of waking up in pain.” At his most cynical, on “Dollar Bill,” with slide and guitar, he sings: “She did it for love / And a dollar, a dollar bill.” His writing isn’t full of mundane details, but when one appears, it tends to catch your attention: “Can you believe the energy she wasted on kitchen floor?” he asks on “She’s in a Frenzy,” proclaiming that he’s strangely jealous of a woman he describes as “a tempest in a coffee cup.” Whatever’s going on to stir all this up, it seems like some intense shit.

White would not like these songs to be used to speculate on what happens behind closed doors; that seems quite evident from the several songs on the album that express enmity towards snoops and know-it-alls. In “Derecho Demonico”, he concludes: “What I do, how I do it and why I do it, is none of your business.” And the entire final track, “Neighbours Blues,” which is actually laid-back enough to stretch into five minutes, is literally a NIMBY anthem. “I know we need them,” he says of the concept of neighbors, “but not in my backyard… Yeah, my hedges are too high, right? They want to watch me so they can lick me.” He adds, in a clever segue, “I’m going to get some of my own” and proceeds to deliver some of the album’s best licks in a guitar solo that reaches something supersonic.

The solos here are almost all short and not at all sweet; White has a way of making his native instrument sound more like an angry theremin than a guitar, on a tune like “Dollar Bill.” Joy sometimes appears right where the solos are placed. On “Nobody Knows,” he sings about the impossibility of anyone ever getting an answer to life’s most imponderable existential questions. Then he blurts out, “Well, maybe someone knows,” suggesting there might be a God who just doesn’t want to let us see, and immediately follows that with a solo that is perhaps meant to convey what it’s like to confront a restrained, mischievous deity. If agnosticism can be summed up in a guitar solo, White has nailed it.

Having explained the album’s fascinating lyrics, it’s worth mentioning that only a handful of White fans will spend any time reflecting on them. When these new songs appear on their U.S. tour, fans will marvel at how well the clarion riffs fit the classic chord progressions already filling stadiums, and they’ll admire their brashness and classic rock power, not their poetic sensibility. This is how it should be. There are some deep thoughts buried in “Frozen Charlotte” about the loneliness of existence and how “we’ve been alone since the day we came home” from the maternity ward. But when everyone is at the Brooklyn Paramount or the Hollywood Palladium in the coming months, shaking their heads in unison at these fans, it will be a jubilee, a lonely experience. A little shared visceral agitation does us all good.