Into The Music
Paul McCartney has announced a new studio album, The Boys of Dungeon Lane, due May 29 via MPL/Capitol. Produced by Andrew Watt, the record is framed as an autobiographical work rooted in McCartney’s childhood in post-war Liverpool. The lead single, “Days We Left Behind,” is out now.
In a press statement, McCartney describes the song as a memory piece. “I was thinking just that, about the days I left behind,” he said. “It involves a bit in the middle about John and Forthlin Road which is the street I used to live in. Dungeon Lane is near there. I used to live in a place called Speke which is quite working class. We didn’t have much at all but it didn’t matter because all the people were great and you didn’t notice you didn’t have much.”
The album is his first full studio LP since McCartney III in 2020, and it represents a meaningful shift in register. That record was a home-recorded lockdown project, all instrumental spontaneity and solitary craft. This one, made with Watt (who has also worked with Ozzy Osbourne, Miley Cyrus, and Eddie Vedder), sounds like something more deliberate. Fourteen tracks. A thematic spine. A title that comes from his own lyrics.
McCartney returns to Liverpool as subject matter with a frequency that suggests something unresolved, or at least unfinished. Every decade or so he makes another pass at the same geography: the terraced streets, the working-class codes, the specific weight of growing up in a city that hadn’t yet figured out what it would become. The Beatles mythology looms over all of it, of course, but McCartney has rarely been coy about that. He mentions John directly in the single. He always does, eventually.
What’s worth watching here is whether Watt’s production brings any friction to the material or whether it polishes it smooth. Watt has a tendency to work big and clean, which has served artists who needed a certain kind of stadium legibility. Whether that approach suits McCartney’s nostalgic mode is a real question. The affection in this material is obvious. Whether the album earns that affection structurally, or just assumes it, is something we’ll find out in May.
The Boys of Dungeon Lane arrives May 29.
This is a bigger deal than the headline suggests. McCartney working with Andrew Watt , the same producer behind Ozzy’s late-career revival and Iggy Pop’s Every Loser , tells you this isn’t a nostalgia project. Watt brings out a rawness in artists that people assumed were past their creative peak, and that’s genuinely interesting. What gets me, though, is the cultural weight that follows Paul wherever he goes. He doesn’t just make an album , he makes a statement about what music can still be for a generation that came up on the Beatles. For those of us who grew up in households where the diaspora kept that music alive across oceans and decades, there’s something meaningful about watching him still push forward at 83 rather than rest on the legacy.
Six years. Every time I think I’ve made peace with a long wait between albums from someone I love, they announce something and I just fall apart a little. I remember where I was when Egypt Station came out , in my car in a parking lot, not ready to go inside yet, just sitting with it. I’ll probably do the same thing May 29th. “Boys of Dungeon Lane” is such a McCartney title too. He’s always had that whimsical storyteller thing and I’m already emotional about it honestly.
Andrew Watt is the variable I keep circling back to. His track record with late-career reinventions , Ozzy, Iggy Pop , suggests he knows how to strip things back to the essential and let the artist’s weight carry the record rather than dressing it up. That’s interesting for McCartney because the temptation at 83 is probably toward legacy consolidation, the kind of tasteful, reverential album that gets praised and forgotten. If Watt pushes him toward something less comfortable, this could be genuinely surprising. Still cautiously optimistic , McCartney at his floor is still better than most people at their ceiling.
PAUL MCCARTNEY. A NEW ALBUM. Six years and now The Boys of Dungeon Lane?? Produced by Andrew Watt who somehow keeps pulling incredible records out of legends , I have no idea what this will sound like and that uncertainty is honestly the most exciting part. May 29 cannot come fast enough, I’m already clearing my calendar.
Ach, six years and he’s still at it , that’s the thing about Macca, the man is constitutionally incapable of stopping. The Boys of Dungeon Lane is a title that sounds like something you’d find written on the inside cover of a school jotter in Allerton circa 1958, and I mean that as the highest possible compliment. Hoping he’s got some of that McCartney melodic magic in him still , the man wrote Yesterday at 22, imagine what he’s got rattling around at 83.