It helps that Angry, the first track on the first album of original material by the Rolling Stones since A Bigger Bang, from 2005, is a certifiable swaggerer of a song. It has a riff that sounds like a disreputable cousin of Start Me Up and a filthy guitar solo that makes you wonder how Keith Richards’s fingers are still able to move so quickly. The second track, Close to You, also sticks closely to the winning blueprint the band virtually patented from the mid-1960s onwards.
There is more. The superior blues-rock vibe of Depending on You sounds like something Hozier would cut his hair off for. Bite My Head Off (featuring crunchy fuzzbox bass by Paul McCartney plus another rippling guitar solo by Richards) is an urgent, sweary track that might have you absent-mindedly reaching for a bottle of beer before your morning coffee.
Dreamy Skies is straight out of their folder of broken-down-pick-up country songs (“an old AM radio is all that I’ve got, it just plays Hank Williamsand some bad honky-tonk …”), while Driving Me Too Hard is embedded in that eminently melodic configuration of effortless guitar solos and she-done-me-wrong lyrics (“every time I give a little bit, you muscle in and take it all”) that are the band’s lingua franca.
Who would have thought that musicians who have so trashed their laurels would return after almost 20 years with such a (mostly) healthy and ill-mannered collection of songs? The Holy Grail for musicians, of course, is that they continue to do in their 60s, 70s and 80s what they were doing in their 20s and 30s.
No one expects the Stones’ quality control to reach the same heights as in their heyday (fans have felt the bruise of disappointment far too often for that), and, true to form, a few songs here are run of the mill – Mess It Up and Live by the Sword, both from 2019 sessions with the band’s late original drummer, Charlie Watts, and Tell Me Straight, the obligatory album offering from Richards.
But when you add the aforementioned stone-cold Stones crackers to Sweet Sounds of Heaven, an extemporised, exultant and drawn-out gospel tune featuring Lady Gaga duelling with Mick Jagger, you have a batch of songs that are the best the band has delivered in decades.
“You think the party’s over but it’s only just begun,” Jagger sings on Whole Wide World. We’re not saying the party will continue for much longer, but it looks as if the Rolling Stones won’t leave until they’re kicked out.
