‘Like slipping into a favourite pair of jeans’: Rolling Stones turn back time as Angry old men

Rolling Stones members (from left) Keith Richards, Ronnie Wood and Mick Jagger attend the Hackney Diamonds album launch event at Hackney Empire, London. Picture: Matrix

When you learn that British band The Rolling Stones has issued a new single titled Angry, your response likely sits somewhere between cautious excitement and suspicious derision.

New music from those old blokes, who have now passed their 60th consecutive year of working in the music business? How good – or how bad – could it possibly be?

Happily, Angry is much more likely to provoke in you the former response than the latter. The four-minute track has the immediate feel of slipping into a favourite, well-worn pair of jeans.

As Mick Jagger famously sang: it’s only rock ‘n’ roll – but if you like what the Stones have been offering across the decades, you’ll probably like this one, too.

Its main features are a shimmering guitar riff that leaves loads of space for a stomping drum backbeat, and an impassioned vocal performance wherein Mick Jagger sounds entirely convincing, as he sings “I hear a melody ringing in my brain / You can keep the memories / Don’t have to be ashamed …”

The highlight arrives in the final minute, as the arrangement moves into a call-and-response coda (“Angry / Don’t be angry with me”) that calls to mind the outro to the 1972 Keith Richards-led cut Happy, albeit with fewer horns.

That part in particular will sound great when sung en masse by the crowded stadiums the Stones continue to play, most recently in Europe last August. (No new dates announced as yet, but more to come seems a safe bet.)

The cover of the Rolling Stones’ new album, Hackney Diamonds.

As the first song released from the band’s upcoming album Hackney Diamonds, it’s a tantalising and enlivening slice of vintage rock ‘n’ roll, and it’s easy to see it sliding into the live setlist amid the dozens of Stones classics that have been etched into the cultural fabric since the 1960s.

In fact, Angry is so compelling that it begins to raise global hopes that this great band may have rediscovered the unique musical chemistry that helped it leap well beyond its original goal of becoming the best blues band in London.

Such hope can be a dangerous thing: its deep 20-plus album catalogue demonstrates that, for every timelessly brilliant Stones track issued, there’s also been quite a few dull, tired or otherwise forgettable tunes that even the most hardcore fans skip over.

Time will tell whether Angry is an upbeat outlier among a middling new collection, or merely one good song from an album scattered with such gems.

Until the new album is released on October 20, though, for now there’s happy news indeed: The Rolling Stones’ new song rocks without question, and that’s enough to put a smile on the faces of rock ‘n’ roll fans young and old.