Greg Dulli stops playing the charming antagonist on The Afghan Whigs’ Soft Control, an album that replaces age denial with an unflinching focus on mortality.
The Afghan Whigs’ music has long been crowded with characters who act on impulse and leave wreckage behind. Greg Dulli wrote those roles with a smirk. On Soft Control, the band’s new album, he stops performing the same part. It is the first Whigs record since their reunion to look directly at mortality rather than dodge it.
The album arrives after personal losses: guitarist Dave Rosser and longtime collaborator Mark Lanegan both died. The previous album, How Do You Burn?, was assembled during the pandemic and seemed determined to prove it was alive. Soft Control doesn’t need that argument. It focuses on what remains.
Musically, the band returns to a familiar sound it has often avoided making self-referential: volume-pedal swells, wah-drenched slide guitar, open strings. The influence of 1996’s
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