Into The Music
The Cockroaches are back. If you know your Rolling Stones lore, that sentence lands differently than it would for most bands. The Cockroaches was the name the Stones adopted for two secret shows in Toronto in 1977, a sleight of hand that has mostly sat dormant in the band’s mythology since. Now it’s back, plastered on posters in Camden Town, pointing at a new website with a countdown clock, and attached to what appears to be the Stones’ first album announcement since 2023’s Hackney Diamonds.
The album, due in July, does not yet have a title. What it does have is a single called “Rough and Twisted,” dropping as a white-label vinyl exclusive on April 11. If the description from The Times is accurate, it hits the expected marks: a killer riff, Mick Jagger’s harmonica howling through the middle of it, and a spirit that does not particularly care whether you were waiting for it. That last part is the most Stones thing about this. They have never really played for permission.
The producer is Andrew Watt, who also handled Hackney Diamonds and has recently been working with Paul McCartney on his upcoming record. Watt has become something of a classic rock whisperer, someone who understands what these bands actually sound like when they are working versus when they are going through motions. Hackney Diamonds was the proof of concept. It was not a nostalgia exercise. It sounded like a band that still had a reason to plug in.
Whether this follow-up reaches the same bar is impossible to say before hearing it. What the announcement signals is that the Stones are not winding down. The Times piece explicitly addresses the rumors that the next record might be their last, and puts those to rest: there are reportedly “at least ten songs in the bag for another one” beyond whatever is on this album. Mick Jagger is 82 years old. Keith Richards is 82. Ronnie Wood is 78. They are, by any reasonable measure, playing borrowed time, and they seem to know it, and they seem to have decided that awareness is a reason to move faster rather than slower.
No tour is planned to support the record, at least not announced. That may change. It may not. The Stones have spent the last few years recalibrating what a living band looks like without Charlie Watts, and the answer has been, largely, that it looks like this: a little more stripped back, a little more deliberate, and still capable of putting something on a record that feels like something.
The Cockroaches countdown expires at 1:41 p.m. on April 11. The math on the name is not exactly subtle, and it doesn’t need to be. The Cockroaches are the organisms that survive everything. The Rolling Stones have made that joke about themselves for fifty years. The thing is, it keeps being true.
