The Rolling Stones will release their 26th studio album, Hackney Diamonds, this Friday. It’s their first album of original material since 2005’s A Bigger Bang.
Their last one, 2016’s Blue & Lonesome, was a collection of blues covers that they quickly recorded while trying to find the right sound for the room at Mark Knopfler‘s British Grove Studios in London, where they were hoping to record an original album.
Mick Jagger tells us he had a little over 20 songs when they started recording Hackney Diamonds late last year at Henson Studios in Hollywood under a tight deadline.
“We did like two, three songs a day and we’d come back to them and then when we selected them we went in and did the overdubs and then it was Christmas. Then after Christmas I went and finished all the vocals in Nassau, Bahamas. There’s no mucking about. No messing around. You know, just go from one song to the next one and the sessions went really pretty smooth, you know. Because my whole thing was that we gotta get in there, I mean Keith and I agreed, we gotta get in there, we’re gonna cut the record, we’re gonna finish it, and I said it’s gonna be done by Valentine’s Day and it more or less was.”
The album contains 12 tracks — 11 of which are originals. 10 are from this last session, while two others, “Mess it Up” and “Live By the Sword,” are from 2019 with Charlie Watts on drums.
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