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"The Two are more of a Who in fight and rapport than anything I've seen live under the name since the 1979 tour with drummer Kenney Jones, the year after Keith Moon's death," wrote Fricke. "And in 'Endless Wire,' the first Who album of new songs since 1982's 'It's Hard,' Daltrey and Townshend have made a record as brazen in its way and right for its day as 'The Who Sell Out' and 'Tommy' were in theirs."

The album also won a four-star rave in Mojo, where their writer hailed it as "the best Who record since 'Quadrophenia,'" while Jenny Eliscu wrote in Rolling Stone that the new album's songs "sound like they could have been written during the same era that yielded Seventies Who classics such as 'Quadrophenia.'"

Even casual Who fans are sure to hear echoes of "Baba O'Riley" in the oscillating synth that opens the album, but the lyrics also play connect-the-dots to "Who's Next." This album features something called the Grid that picks up a concept Townshend used in "Lifehouse," which, of course, became "Who's Next."

As Townshend, who produced the album, would describe his latest effort in a chat with Rolling Stone, "This album is a real mixture. There are some songs that fit the 'Who's Next' pattern: sonic experiments with complex and careful techniques behind them. But there are also very basic analog eight-track home-studio recordings – even a few tracks that are just acoustic guitar and vocals. I think the album that this one most closely echoes is one I made with Ronnie Lane in 1976 called 'Rough Mix' – but sonically it stands as a Who record somewhere between 'Who By Numbers' and 'Who Are You.'"

The back half of the disc includes a 29-minute, 10-song mini-opera, "Wire and Glass," inspired by Townshend's novella "The Boy Who Heard Music." Basically, it tells the story of three kids who put a band together, have a hit and try to deal with holding it together. As Townshend explained the premise in his interview with Rolling Stone, "A band is a very extreme form of co-dependency, to use the recovery term. It's like a marriage, without the sex, without the ceremony, without the love, without the children, without the golf, without the Sunday lunches, without the in-laws. When you put a band together, you tend to accept that this guy or girl in your band can do the job, but God, they're so weird. And if you get a hit, you're stuck with this weird person for the rest of your life."

On the eve of this, The Who's tour since staging a farewell tour back in 1982, the band pronounced itself both fit and ready to rock. The surviving original members are joined by Ringo's son, Zak Starkey, on the drums; Pino Palladino on bass guitar; Townshend's kid brother Simon on second guitar; and longtime keyboardist John Bundrick.

As to why they chose to do a new Who album now, after 24 years of silence, four years after losing original bassist John Entwistle, in that same interview with Rolling Stone, Townshend explained that on the last day of the last tour with Entwistle, he sat down with his

"A band is a very extreme form of co-dependency, to use the recovery term. It's like a marriage, without the sex, without the ceremony, without the love, without the children, without the golf, without the Sunday lunches, without the in-laws. When you put a band together, you tend to accept that this guy or girl in your band can do the job, but God, they're so weird. And if you get a hit, you're stuck with this weird person for the rest of your life."

Pete Townshend

manager, Bill Curbishley, and talked about their future touring options: "I said, 'Is there a possibility that we're enabling John Entwistle? Rather than helping him, what we're actually doing is sending him home with, after tax, probably a million dollars, half of it's probably gonna go up his girlfriend's nose.' God rest her soul, she's dead now. I thought 'I don't need to play old Who songs. I could sell them to … CSI.' When John died, I decided that if I were to ever go back on tour with Roger, it has to be artistically driven. I thought, 'If we're going to do this, we have to have new music, and it has to come from me.'"