The new Rolling Stones album “Hackney Diamonds” will be released on October 20, 2023. While the band kept the information relatively general at the press conference with talk show host Jimmy Fallon, Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Ronnie Wood and producer Andrew Watt provide detailed insights into the studio process in a recent interview with the New York Times. Among other things, it talks about a sound design that Richards calls “weaving”.
What this means is the “constantly changing, spontaneous interaction of the instruments, especially the guitars,” says the article. The band recorded the basic structure of most of the songs together in the studio. In the mix, the musicians were divided up the way they hear themselves on stage: Richards’ guitar came from the left, Ronnie Wood’s guitar from the right. “I wanted it to sound huge,” says Watt. “Because they are larger than life. They’re the fucking Stones. When you listen to this album, you should imagine the Stones playing in a stadium, because that’s exactly what they are.”
Ronnie Wood says: “Once the band gets together and the magic starts, who knows where it can go?” As the New York Times article states, Wood shares guitar lines not only with Richards, but also with Mick Jagger.
Information about “Hackney Diamonds”
“Hackney Diamonds” is the first Rolling Stones studio album to feature original songs since 2005’s “A Bigger Bang.” “We got it done pretty quickly, there were a lot of ideas flying around. We collected them last Christmas,” said Keith Richards succinctly. And Mick Jagger openly and honestly admitted: “We were really lazy” – that’s why the new album took so long to arrive. Given the fact that the band has toured a lot in recent years, that may not be true, but the band apparently didn’t plan on spending much time in the studio, says Jagger. “We had already done something. And then we just set a deadline. Keith and I made the songs at Christmas, finished them in January and mixed them in February.” So the band managed to have a new album ready by Valentine’s Day – in just two months.