Culture 3 min read By Trevor Kendall
The Raconteurs Announce Broken Boy Soldiers XX for 20th Anniversary
The Raconteurs will mark the 20th anniversary of their debut album with Broken Boy Soldiers XX, a 23-track archival collection arriving as the 70th installment of Third Man Records' Vault subscription series.
The Raconteurs are marking the 20th anniversary of their debut album with an archival companion release. Titled Broken Boy Soldiers XX, the collection will arrive as the 70th installment of Third Man Records' Vault subscription series, the Nashville label founded by Jack White.
The package spans three 180-gram colored vinyl LPs and carries 23 tracks in total. Of those, 22 are previously unreleased recordings drawn from the sessions and era surrounding the band's 2006 debut. The original Broken Boy Soldiers introduced the group — Jack White, Brendan Benson, Jack Lawrence, and Patrick Keeler — as a collaborative project distinct from White's work with The White Stripes, and its release helped define the mid-2000s rock landscape.
Third Man Records has built the Vault series into one of the most closely watched subscription programs in physical music, with each installment curated around a specific artist, era, or archival trove. Numbering the Raconteurs set as the 70th package places it within a long lineage of releases that have included live recordings, demos, and out-of-print material. For collectors, the combination of colored vinyl, unreleased audio, and a milestone anniversary is likely to make the set a significant addition to the series.
The Raconteurs formed in Detroit and released Broken Boy Soldiers in May 2006. The album reached the top ten in several countries and earned a Grammy nomination, driven by singles including «Steady, as She Goes.» A second album, Consolers of the Lonely, followed in 2008, and the band returned in 2019 with Help Us Stranger, which debuted at number one on the Billboard 200. The anniversary package focuses specifically on the debut's legacy rather than the group's later catalog.
Details about the full tracklist, packaging, and shipping timeline are expected to be shared with Vault subscribers through Third Man's usual channels. The label has not yet indicated whether any of the unreleased material will be made available outside the subscription window, a question that has followed previous Vault releases. For now, the set stands as a document of a band that briefly became one of rock's most prominent side projects and a snapshot of a specific moment in early-2000s independent music.
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