The Rolling Stones are back, and they've brought a few famous friends.
Hackney Diamonds, the band's first album of new songs in 18 years, features guest appearances from the likes of Lady Gaga, Paul McCartney and Stevie Wonder.
Poignantly, it also features Charlie Watts, the stalwart Stones drummer who died in 2021 after almost six decades in the band. His drumming, recorded in 2019, features on two of the album's dozen tracks, with Steve Jordan playing on the rest.
Watts' absence lent a wistful note to the excitement of surviving Stones Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood when they came to east London's Hackney district on Wednesday (Thursday AEST) to unveil the new album and announce its release date: October 20.
"It would have been a lot harder without Charlie's blessing," he said.
The album reveal was executed with the swaggering showmanship the Stones are famous for. It followed a cryptic teaser campaign, in which a glittery, jagged version of the band's iconic mouth and tongue logo was projected onto the façade of landmarks in cities around the world, including New York, London and Paris.
Hard-core fans lined up in a heatwave outside the Hackney Empire, where the band members were interviewed onstage by The Tonight Show host Jimmy Fallon in front of dozens of sweltering journalists and a global online audience.
Inside the ornate former Edwardian musical hall where Charlie Chaplin and Stan Laurel once performed, Jagger, 80, Richards, 79 and Wood, 76 gave details of the Stones' first studio album of new songs since A Bigger Bang in 2005. The band released a set of blues covers, Blue & Lonesome, in 2016.
The lead single is called Angry, but Jagger said not all the songs are furious. The album also contains "love songs, ballads, country-type" sounds, he said.
Recorded in December and January at studios around the world, the album sees the Stones team up with Grammy-winning producer Andrew Watt, who helped assemble the starry guest list, which also includes former Stone Bill Wyman.
Jagger said Lady Gaga — who sings on Sweet Sound of Heaven — was recording in a next-door studio while the Stones were in Los Angeles and ended up on the album after she popped in to say hello.
The band screened the video for Angry, which has a classic mid-tempo crunchy Stones sound. The clip features Euphoria star Sydney Sweeney, shown cruising LA's Sunset Boulevard in a red convertible, past billboards of the Stones from various eras.
Jagger joked that the long gap between albums was due to laziness.
"I don't want to be big-headed but we wouldn't have put this album out if we hadn't really liked it," he said. "We said we had to make a record we really love ourselves."
Hackney Diamonds is a slang term for shattered glass, and the band also teased fans with an ad in the local Hackney Gazette newspaper for a fictional glass repair business: "When you say gimme shelter, we'll fix your shattered windows."
