ZZ Top

Like precious few bands from the '70s whose best work is mummified daily thanks to classic rock radio, ZZ Top just keeps rolling on into the next decade. There's much to love here, from the downright nasty stomp of "Fuzzbox Voodoo," the powerhouse slow blues of "Cover Your Rig," the bass-pumping looniness of "Girl in a T-Shirt," to the slow grind of "Breakaway." While Billy Gibbon's guitar tones on this album are highly reminiscent of Tres Hombres (an early high-water mark for the band), the high production sheen from their '80s albums remains intact. But Gibbons hasn't played with this much over-the-top abandon since their pre-beard 'n' babes days, and that's what separates this album from the three that came before it.

After nearly a decade’s wait, fans of “that little ole’ band from Texas,’ ZZ Top, will be rewarded on Sept. 11 with the trio’s 15th album, ‘La Futura.’The ten-song record, co-produced by Rick Rubin and the band’s ever-so-stylish guitarist and singer Billy Gibbons. How’d they get that title? “We thought long and hard about what this album should be,” Gibbons says in a press release. “We wanted to recall the directness of our early stuff but not turn our backs on contemporary technology. The result of this melding of the past and the present is, of course, ‘La Futura.’”

La Futura, ZZ Top's 15th studio album and the group's first since 2003's Mescalero, was recorded at Foam Box Recordings in Houston and at Shangri La Studios in Malibu, and produced by Rick Rubin and the band's guitarist, Billy Gibbons. The album was recorded at a leisurely pace between tours over a four-year period, resulting in ten new tracks from the best little three-chord boogie band to ever come out of Texas.–by Steve Leggett

This two-disc version doubles down on the band s music with 40 tracks that form a more detailed snapshot of the trio s stellar career. In addition to including every song heard on the single disc collection, Very Baddest digs deeper into early albums to uncover killer tracks like "Pearl Necklace," "Just Got Paid" and "(Someone Else Been) Shaking Your Tree." The collection also spotlights later albums like XXX (1999) and Mescalero (2003) with "Fearless Boogie" and "Que Lastima." Appropriately, the collection closes with ZZ Top's unique take on the immortal "As Time Goes By," a song made famous by the 1942 movie Casablancaa and a tacit commentary on the group's unparalleled longevity.