Keith Richards confirms that a Rolling Stones original album is in the works
While the band have released covers, live albums, compilations, and box sets in recent years, this will be the band's first original output since 2005.
In late 2016, the Rolling Stones released an all-covers album of blues classics, “Blue & Lonesome." The band had in fact started working on new, original material during those recording sessions: "That's what we were working on when we decided to cut these blues songs," Ronnie Wood told Billboard in November of last year. "The blues songs that we played we hit it once or twice maximum and cut it, so we had an album in two or three days." That effort, recorded in December 2015, was critically acclaimed ("Nobody has ever doubted how tight the Stones can be, but these are 12 tracks in which they swing hard," The Guardian praised). Wood said: "The new material will take a while to sit and reshape.”
On Friday, Keith Richards disclosed in a video ("Ask Keith Richards") that the band is indeed in the early stages of making headway on the previously alluded-to next album. “Yes, we are — very, very shortly,” Richards said. “Cutting some new stuff and considering where to take it next."
In the meantime, the group is set to release a new book and companion DVD that collects its radio and TV performances from the 1960s; the publication is slated for late September. "Rolling Stones on Air in the Sixties," published by HarperCollins, will chart the group's rise from a letter sent to the BBC in 1963 to a television special broadcast by the network in 1969.
This fall, the group will also head out on a European "No Filter" tour, starting in Hamburg in September and ending in Paris in October.
NME noted that there's the prospect of a team up between Mick Jagger and British grime artist and rapper Skepta, as indicated by an Instagram photo with little reveal on the details of the collaboration.
