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The Rolling Stones look incredible in their latest video. Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood don’t look a day beyond 1972 as they kick-start a party heaving with groovy youngsters. That’s AI for you. It’s a cheeky conceit that works because In the Stars is classic, timeless, swashbuckling Stones. Tick.
Now compare it with Paul McCartney’s latest. An invisible hand scrawls the lyrics to Days We Left Behind with ink on paper. A fireside guitar rings as the odd postwar photograph drifts into frame. Liverpool. Childhood. Mother Mary. Old friend John. It’s Macca at his most sentimental, another masterstroke of melodious emotion. Tick.
Long after the most famous rivalry in rock’n’roll stopped mattering, consistency remains the most astounding feature of each brand, to use the modern parlance nobody was crass enough to invoke in the old days.
There’s more common ground now. The Beatle plays bass on the imminent Stones album – just on one track, as he did on their last – and both legends have employed lucky Millennial hitmaker Andrew Watt to produce their new albums.
In terms of message and intent, though, there’s one striking contrast between McCartney’s The Boys of Dungeon Lane and the Stones’ Foreign Tongues, which land within weeks of each other in 2026. As the world’s greatest rock’n’roll band continues to insist that age is an illusion, rock’s greatest living songwriter begs to differ.
As well as a rich stroke of poetry, Dungeon Lane is a poignant geographic reference: a rough quarter of the Liverpool docks where the young McCartney once roamed. “I used to walk past your house” are his first spoken words on the album.
What follows is not all wandering through an 84-year-old Scouser’s memory but titles like Lost Horizon cue the main theme. Down South is an acoustic ramble about hitchhiking with his schoolmate George. Home to Us is a knees-up duet with Ringo. Salesman Saint is a touching vision of his parents circa World War II.
McCartney’s voice is failing but in the comfort of the recording studio he makes that an asset. As he layers up his always inventive harmonies, the wobble and croak carry priceless emotional clout. His choice to play the majority of instruments himself cuts the mark of a singular craftsman deeper into the grain.
Jagger, meanwhile, has never sung better in his 82 years than he does on Foreign Tongues. His full-blooded attack sounds like it’s been flown in directly from the Stones’ Some Girls or Tattoo You: obnoxious bawl for blues-rock opener Rough and Twisted; impossible falsetto for R&B organ groove Jealous Lover.
Refusal to ‘act their age’ is a huge part of the Stones’ legacy, effectively torching the very concept for their generation and all that follow. Richards and Wood are the living embodiment of rock as sound and culture. Good luck working out who’s who as they duck and weave from power riff to cat’s howl on Never Wanna Lose You, Hit Me in the Head and other titles teenagers might have written.
Experience matters, too. Lyrics about conspiracy, corruption and tyranny are nothing new to their Satanic majesties but the old timer’s perspective weighs heavily on a couple of the more substantial tracks. “Divine intervention is out of the question” is the mocking refrain of a ramshackle boogie across a dystopian America.
A second road trip, Ringing Hollow, is a Bakersfield country ramble that draws real blood. “Lady Liberty don’t look so good,” Jagger sneers in the throes of some random arrest that leads him to the door of an unnamed president. The fact that he’s stared down 14 of them gives his contempt extra bite.
The Stones’ sacred chemistry is sound as ever. Even if, over 14 tracks, you can’t help feeling a certain contractual bind. Cue the squawking slammer, the leering disco, Keef’s end-of-the-bottle ballad and the guests (Robert Smith, Steve Winwood, Chad Smith, the late Charlie Watts) you can’t quite discern in the mix. Tick, tick, tick, tick. The only curveball, an Amy Winehouse cover, is also the only real misstep.
If this were still a competition, the Beatle’s edge remains the same as ever, too: a will to experiment that makes Dungeon Lane by far the more intriguing sonic experience. With only himself to please, McCartney digs ever deeper for the eccentric textures and structures he lays down like train tracks conjured from thin air as melody steams ahead.
His reckless way with guitars, acoustic and electric, has been a revelation on recent albums. He’ll toot up a counter melody on recorder if the fancy takes him and weave a fully arranged Glenn Miller pastiche into the margins of a minor-key folk drama.
His plot lines are less bound by convention, too. He wanders into the heads of a lust-crazed voyeur in As You Lie There and a psychedelic mushroom voyager in Mountain Top, then manages to get back to the kitchen sink for Momma Gets By.
The legends’ only real competition, of course, is with their respective pasts. Against those monumental odds, both albums deliver. But judging the umpteenth Stones and McCartney records against their own unimpeachable catalogues overlooks what’s really at stake here: the larger story of which they form a living part.
As in any long friendship, the present moment of The Boys of Dungeon Lane and Foreign Tongues is infinitely enlarged by everything that came before. The cliches are self-aware, the jokes have context, the flaws are a part of the furniture and, most importantly, love is the only feasible reason to continue.
