Rolling Stones reveal album details
The Rolling Stones are back, and they’ve brought a few famous friends.
“Hackney Diamonds,” the band’s first album of new songs in 18 years, features guest appearances from the likes of Lady Gaga, Paul McCartney and Stevie Wonder. Poignantly, it also features Charlie Watts, the stalwart Stones drummer who died in 2021 after almost six decades in the band. His drumming, recorded in 2019, is featured on two of the album’s dozen tracks, with Steve Jordan playing on the rest.
Watts’ absence lent a wistful note to the excitement of surviving Stones Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood when they came to east London’s Hackney district last week to unveil the album and announce its release date: Oct. 20.
Of Watts, Richards said, “Of course, he’s missed incredibly. But thanks to Charlie we have Steve Jordan, who was his recommendation if anything should happen to him. It would have been a lot harder without
Charlie’s blessing.”
The album reveal was executed with the swaggering showmanship the Stones are famous for. It followed a cryptic teaser campaign, in which a glittery, jagged version of the band’s iconic mouth and tongue logo was projected onto the façade of landmarks in cities around the world.
Hard-core fans lined up in a heatwave outside the Hackney Empire, where the band members were interviewed onstage by Jimmy Fallon in front of dozens of journalists and a global online audience.
Inside the former Edwardian musical hall, Jagger, 80, Richards, 79 and Wood, 76, gave details of the Stones’ first studio album of new songs since “A Bigger Bang” in 2005. The band released a set of blues covers, “Blue & Lonesome,” in 2016.
The lead single is called “Angry,” but Jagger said not all the songs are furious. The album also contains “love songs, ballads, country-type” sounds, he said.
Recorded in December and January at studios around the world, the album sees the Stones team up with Grammywinning producer Andrew Watt, who helped assemble the starry guest list, which also includes former Stone Bill Wyman.
The band screened the video for “Angry,” which has a classic mid-tempo crunchy Stones sound. The clip features “Euphoria” star Sydney Sweeney, cruising LA’s Sunset Boulevard in a red convertible past billboards of the Stones from various eras.
Founded in 1962, the Stones show no signs of planning to retire. The band played a 60th anniversary tour of Europe in 2022, and Wood said they had an American tour “penciled in” for next year.
Wood said retirement would be “impossible.” “You’ve got to keep playing,” he said.
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