Clearly, there’s no rest for the wicked: senior rockers The Rolling Stones are releasing a new album. Hackney Diamonds will be the band’s first studio album of original music since 2005 (A Bigger Bang), and the first since the death of drummer Charlie Watts in 2021. To commemorate the momentous occasion, Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, and Ronnie Wood sat down in—where else—Hackney with Jimmy Fallon to share details about the new LP.
The band appeared onstage with Fallon at the Hackney Empire Theater in front of a live audience. Wood explained that the group hit the studio just before Christmas 2022, recording 23 tracks. Hackney Diamonds, which will be released on October 20, ultimately features 12 of those tracks. Steve Jordan, Charlie Watts’ own chosen replacement, plays on most of those songs. However, two of them were recorded in 2019 with Watts on the drums, and one even features longtime former bassist Bill Wyman.
There was another featured artist revealed during the livestream: Lady Gaga duets on the track “Sweet Sound Of Heaven.” (Judging by Fallon’s surprised reaction, Wood perhaps wasn’t yet supposed to dish that info.) The full tracklist is as follows:
1. Angry
2. Get Close
3. Depending On You
4. Bite My Head Off
5. Whole Wide World
6. Dreamy Skies
7. Mess It Up
8. Live By The Sword
9. Driving Me Too Hard
10. Tell Me Straight
11. Sweet Sound Of Heaven (ft. Lady Gaga)
12. Rolling Stone Blues
The livestream concluded with the premiere of the music video for the first single “Angry,” which features Euphoria star Sydney Sweeney. (Sweeney, in attendance, called the “Angry” video the “biggest thing” she’d ever done.) The song is a classic Stones sound, and the video depicts Sweeney rocking out in a red convertible as she’s serenaded by billboards of the Stones in their many eras over the years.
Hackney Diamonds has already been highly anticipated as the band teased its new era—the Stones’ famous lips logo was projected near several famous monuments around the world, signaling the big announcement. The band also placed an ad in the Hackney Gazette for a fake glass repair business that redirected to their website. Many fans were brought up short by an error message; others managed to get through to a snippet of “Angry.”
Though Hackney Diamonds is the first original Stones release in nearly two decades, the band certainly hasn’t been sitting on their hands. Last year, they embarked on the Sixty Tour to commemorate the group’s 60th anniversary; the year before that, they concluded the years-long No Filter Tour which had been interrupted by the pandemic. Though frontman Jagger recently turned 80, the group shows no sign of slowing down any time soon.