Like every other Rolling Stones album dubbed the best since 1978’s Some Girls, Hackney Diamonds features enough cringey lyrics, dodgy guitar riffs, and self-plagiarism (such as Keith Richards playing “Tumbling Dice” at the beginning of “Driving Me Too Hard”) to keep it out of the pantheon of their greatest releases. What parts of the album do capture is a genuinely contemporary flair that the Stones haven’t successfully embodied since they triangulated the emerging threads of punk and disco back in the late 1970s.
The album’s crisp, booming drums, hooky choruses, and livewire vocals have a radio-ready sheen without feeling forced, or compromising the Stones’s essential traits. The opening track, “Angry,” hardens the edges around a shiny pop-forward hook with a hit of stadium swagger and a roiling outro that piles on knotty guitar solos from Richards and Ronnie Wood. The fact that the Stones don’t sound completely out of time—in fact, they sound more energetic than they have in decades—is no mean feat considering that they haven’t released an album of original material in nearly two decades.
Credit goes, in part, to Andrew Watt, whose combination of hitmaking bona fides and classic-rock fandom may have made him the only producer on Earth who could have threaded the needle precisely enough to turn “Mess It Up,” whose chorus veers into straight-up dance-pop, into a credible Rolling Stones song. The secret: Richards’s trademark open-tuning chords on the verses and the late Charlie Watts’s drum track, recorded in 2019, which manages to be both effortlessly danceable and understated. (Drumming duties on the album are otherwise mostly performed by Steve Jordan, Richards’s old compadre in the X-Pensive Winos).
Watt shepherds the Stones into unearthing long-dormant corners of their unparalleled stylistic range. You’d have to go back to 1981’s Tattoo You to hear a funky, percussive track, complete with sax solo, like “Get Close,” and as far back as 1972’s Exile On Main St. for a full-blown gospel rave-up like the rapturous “Sweet Sounds of Heaven.” Both songs clearly evoke past Stones eras, but through some combination of age-defyingly loose and limber performances, they aren’t so overtly retro that they can’t sit comfortably next to more pop-friendly fare like “Depending on You.” That track replaces the maudlin sentimentality usually endemic to Jagger’s latter-day breakup ballads with heart-tugging melodic hooks and slide guitar.
As high-energy and catchy as most of Hackney Diamonds is, though, the album also showcases a few tracks that suggest that the Stones might be better off embracing their age rather than asserting their eternal youthfulness (“I’m too old for dying and too young to lose,” Jagger declares on “Depending on You”). The gentle country shuffle “Dreamy Skies” sheds the studio varnish for a more ramshackle, front-porch feel, and if “Mess It Up” and “Angry” are Jagger and Watt’s vision of the Stones in 2023—keeping up with the times and still full of piss and vinegar—then “Tell Me Straight,” a gossamer after-hours ballad, is Richards’s. “Did we have something or nothing at all…Is my future all in my past?” he ponders in his lovably leathery croak, sounding weathered by the years.
The album closes with a cover of “Rolling Stone Blues,” the 1950 Muddy Waters classic that gave the band its name. Tracked live with just Richards on guitar and Jagger on vocal and harmonica, it’s a ghostly, spine-tingling performance that sees the Glimmer Twins at last morphing into the kind of pseudo-mythical bluesmen they started their careers seeking to emulate over 60 years ago. If most of Hackney Diamonds proves that the Stones can still sound relevant, these final songs prove that they can do better than that: They can still be timeless.
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yes, yes. but I will still buy it. ….look at the last albums by b52s, blondie, pet shop boys. ….. as good as their early outings. I hope to like hackney for at least some reasons. …. at first, I disliked the stones’ black n blue album…..now, I think its charming.
No mention of Bite My Head Off and Paul McCartney contribution. Not much of an album review leaving out most of the tracks. Maybe they’re planning a part 2 review!
I was 12 years old when I saw the Stones. Mick Taylor was on guitar . Ike and Tina Turner were on the bill at Oakland Coliseum also it was 1969 after all . None of the reviews of the new album , Hackney Diamonds , mention the song “Whole Wide World”. When that chorus kicked in I was on my feet singing and dancing. I read the Pitchfork review and burst out laughing, some people just don’t get it.
How could you leave out “Live By the Sword”? The best track on the album after “Sweet Sounds of Heaven” and some of the best rock ‘n roll anyone’s ever done – and the only track to include both Watts and Wyman, with piano by Elton John.
most people doing these reviews we’re not even born yet when some girls was released. so they have no scope. of course they don’t get it. they can’t
Agree that leaving out Sword, which has the full Stones line-up (Jagger, Richards, Wood, Wyman, Watts) plus Elton, and which at a minimum is a major Stones effort, would seem to indicate some serious tone-deafness.
I love this album! My only complaint is something in the mastering process makes the disc sound terrible at loud volume, ironic because the songs deserve to be cranked up!
Love the songs, hate the mixes… over compressed, too bright and do I actually hear auto tune on Mick?
I really parts of this album but to my dismay there is a cheesy sheen to a lot of it, especially the choruses. for this reason, I am out.
This reviewer is no Lester Bangs. Don’t much care for its opinions. (Did I get the pronoun right?)
Angelo MedureJr as I said Mick Jagger NBA in business London economic School business greatest frontman in the world still called jagger swagger 80 years old they’re torn in Europe just made their new album which is out of sight I’m a bass player and they’re my idol especially Mick Jagger The Beatles last Jagger’s 80 sounds like he’s 30 it’s he’s just unbelievable I mean down to earth and to make it through what he’s made it through and keep his head and to keep his edge is unbelievable in its own right so he’s like my idol I could just imagine how he felt on stage like a God everybody you know worshiping them you know screaming simply when he plays Sympathy for the devil and he came out , in the lyrics he was in his twenties and the right those type of lyrics he had to be intelligent especially when they got busted he told those 50s guys with the with the world glasses on you know he he told them like it was yeah they tried to trick him up but he got him good I have a video and they were 18 months on the Mike Douglas show unbelievable
These guys are on average about 80 years old. This is some great rock and roll but also able to introduce the post rock and roll generation to The Stones. It’s also better than anything new the Beatles have done in the last 50 years! “Angry” is a great start to any album.
Enjoying the guitar interplay and would love it if someone IDed each solo (they can’t all be Ronnie, right?). Haven’t seen that anywhere including the 2 interview features in Guitar Player!