The new Rolling Stones album is the band’s best since Some Girls in 1978. Rock critics have been making this claim since the mid-1980s to talk up a series of albums – Steel Wheels, Voodoo Lounge, Bridges to Babylon – so you probably won’t believe me when I say their new one, Hackney Diamonds, really is that good. Better, actually. When I tell Mick Jagger how much I enjoyed it, by this point he’s as suspicious as anyone: “I’ve got really good reactions from people that seem to be genuine.”
They haven’t released an album of new songs since 2005’s A Bigger Bang, instead doing 2016 covers album Blue & Lonesome and a series of high-energy, record-breaking world tours. Jagger turned 80 this year, and with Keith Richards passing that milestone in December, I half expected them to do something like Johnny Cash’s final recordings with Rick Rubin, contemplating the Styx with a downbeat croak, particularly as it comes after the death in 2021 of Charlie Watts, the band’s drummer since they first stepped into a studio in 1963.
