Right from the day they first loaded up the band van in Akron, Ohio, Patrick Carney and Dan Auerbach of the Black Keys have demonstrated a tireless work ethic. Their early years were marked by endless tours that criss-crossed North America, grinding it out in dives like Vancouver’s now-defunct Pic Pub.

Records have come at an impressive rate. The Keys have birthed eight full-lengths—including this year’s wildly ambitious Turn Blue—since debuting with 2002’s blues-scuzzed The Big Come Up.

As Carney and Auerbach started to find success with records like Magic Potion and the breakout hit Attack & Release, they kept up a pace best described as frantic, both in the studio and on the road. Downtime, if you could call it that, was marked by solo records (Auerbach’s Keep It Hid in 2009) and side projects (Carney’s Drummer, whose eponymous 2009 debut found him playing bass). Both musicians would also dabble in producing, with Auerbach helming Dr. John’s comeback triumph Locked Down, and Carney providing guidance for Tennis and the Sheepdogs.

And then, somewhere along the line, it all started to seem like too much. Which explains why Carney is being unapologetically lazy today. When the fabulously bespectacled drummer is reached at home in his adopted city of Nashville, he reveals that he’s busy doing nothing. This is out of necessity. The past couple of years have taught him that piling project after project on his plate isn’t good for his sanity.

“I’m not doing anything this whole week,” Carney says. “I’ve been in my studio twice, and both times it wasn’t for work. For the past two or three years, every time we’ve had a two- or three-week break, I’d pick up some project to do. And what happened is that I kind of got fried. What I’m doing now with my breaks is trying to take it easy and have some sort of normal routine. When I’m at home I want to be hanging out with my wife, not be completely busy.”

The Black Keys’ determination to keep busy goes a long way to explaining their success today. And “successful” doesn’t begin to describe Carney and Auerbach, whose early shows at the Pic, the Red Room, and Richard’s on Richards left plenty of Vancouverites with I-saw-them-when bragging rights.

The past half-decade has brought platinum albums in an era when 99 out of 100 consumers rip their music for free from the Pirate Bay. The duo headlines hockey rinks at a time when the stadium circuit is the almost exclusive domain of candy-coated pop tarts (Katy Perry) and boomer-approved legends (Fleetwood Mac). And they’ve become rock-radio royalty without losing their status as critical darlings, something that hasn’t been achieved since the rise of Radiohead.

The Black Keys’ Midas streak has continued with Turn Blue, which has received some of the best reviews of the band’s already storied career. Working with producer Brian “Danger Mouse” Burton, Carney and Auerbach have been lauded for their most musically varied album to date, with songs light years away from the vicious primitiveness of The Big Come Up.

Shit gets trippy right from the top on Turn Blue, with the epically dazed-and-confused kick-off track “Weight of Love” smelling like preserved ’70s bong tar and vintage faded denim. Backed by dark-side-of-the-moon organ washes, Auerbach comes on like a peyote-doped guitar hero wandering the midnight badlands, the track clocking in at nearly seven minutes. The only thing that would make “Weight of Love” greater would be if it came with its own black-light poster and roach clip.

The Black Keys prove themselves pretty much open to anything, whether it’s the elephant-stomp soul of “In Time”, the circus psychedelia of “Fever”, or the freak-fried country of “Bullet in the Brain”. Coming up with material for Turn Blue was easy, Carney reports. Figuring out what would be a good fit for the album wasn’t.

“We recorded 30 songs for this record,” the drummer says. “The main sessions were in Michigan at the beginning of 2013 and L.A. the late summer of that same year. And both of them were coming from completely different spots. When we were working in Michigan, we were listening to a lot of Funkadelic and a lot of Creedence Clearwater Revival. Then we went in with Danger Mouse and basically made another record. Those sessions were coming from a completely different place.”

A dark cloud was hanging over the Black Keys by the time they got to L.A.

“Dan was going through a divorce, and having a hard time,” Carney explains simply.

But through the blackness there were also moments of inspiration, as the Black Keys kept themselves open to ideas and directions that would have seemed hard to imagine in their stripped-down early days. Keyboards and synths are all over Turn Blue, giving the record a spaced-out shimmer.

There was also a new way of working. Carney and Auerbach started off as an insular team, bonding as kids in Akron over a mutual love of acts like the Wu-Tang Clan and the Geto Boys. For the longest time, they were determined to do everything in-house, vowing to never work with an outside producer.

That changed when they asked Burton to help with Attack & Release and again with the chart-topping El Camino, both of which yielded hit singles and top marks on Metacritic. The producer, who also plays in electro-soul faves Broken Bells, not only returns on Turn Blue, but has become an integral part of the compositional process, earning cowriting credits on every one of the album’s tracks.

Carney acknowledges that the Black Keys have evolved in their thinking, while admitting that took some serious overhauling of their attitude.

“Early on in our career, right after our first record, we started getting courted by big labels,” he remembers. “A producer, who I’m not going to name, and isn’t necessarily well-known, flew us out to his studio and we recorded some songs with him. We came back and realized that while we were in the studio, we kind of got misguided. We got into the process, and ended up making this really glossed-out recording. That made no sense at all, so we just shut everybody out and got really super-defensive. That happens to a lot of bands.”

What changed for the Keys was being contacted by Burton to write songs for an Ike Turner comeback album. That project never took off, but it led to a relationship with the producer, to the point where Carney asked Burton if he’d be interested in helping out.

“When we were doing what was supposed to be the Ike Turner album in the studio, we were attacking the songs as a four-piece band, not afraid to do overdubs and shit,” Carney says. “As a result, we basically decided we wanted to make a Black Keys record the same way.”

And that continues to this day, with the Black Keys remaining, as Turn Blue proves, forever open to change. Carney laughs and says that the desire to move forward isn’t limited to the studio. Having worked long, hard, and relentlessly enough on the Black Keys, the drummer has been thinking it’s now time to change things up in other ways.

Asked what’s on the horizon, Carney responds, “We’re on tour through to Christmas, and then we’ve got tours booked from February to April. I’m sure there will also be more stuff to do in the summer. We probably won’t start thinking about making another record until the touring has stopped. But I also think it’s important in life to decompress and forget about everything that you just did.”

After pausing, he laughs and adds, “But honestly, the best answer to that question is probably ‘Have a kid.’ We started this band when I was 21. I’ll be 35 by the time this tour stops. At some point, I have to grow the fuck up.”

The Black Keys headline the Pacific Coliseum next Thursday (October 30).