The tongue of the boomerati refuses to be silenced. The end of cultural consensus—chiefly derived from an era and a generation that either no longer exists or is dying off with remarkable resistance—drags us toward a cultural landscape where hours have lost their clock (in the words of Grafton Tanner) and nostalgia is, perhaps, our most precious and overexploited commodity. It is amidst the death throes of the canon that The Rolling Stones are playing their hand.
These foreign tongues present themselves as a natural continuation of Hackney Diamonds (2023), with Andrew Watt steering the production.
We are met with native, unmistakable sounds, as heard in the energetic kick-off of the Stonesy blues of “Rough and Twisted” or “Hit Me in the Head”—the latter produced by Don Was, an old acquaintance whose work delivers a warmer, more classic, analog feel.
Unlike Hackney Diamonds, we don’t find quite as many dancefloor-ready singles here, though playful, high-energy outbursts like “Jealous Lover” serve as a perfect showcase for Jagger’s fantastic falsetto.
It’s in some of the mid-tempos where we find a more pronounced contemporary production—namely “In the Stars”, “Never Wanna Lose You”, and “Back in Your Life”—but at no point do we encounter a diluted version of the Stones. They sound exactly like what we expect, and they deliver.
There is no twilight-years melancholy in this particular coda (though “Some of Us”, featuring Richards on vocals, hints at it). It’s as if they want their lasting memory to be that of a pub band doing what they do best: blues and rock and roll—a canon they wrote themselves and refuse to erase.
I doubt anyone, at this stage, is expecting another Exile on Main St. (1972)—for this writer, their crowning achievement—but certain questions inevitably arise: Why? Money? At this point, I highly doubt it (“Show me how to spend it with you, honey”!). Legacy? Those who defined what a sound, a genre, and a way of life actually mean could never destroy that cathedral. Perhaps it’s just that final boomer breath: a way of measuring oneself against one’s own past, or simply staring into the abyss and saying: I still got it.
The Stones aren’t coming home; they are home—even if nothing but the foundations remain.