Paul McCartney Is Back Outside and on Fire

Each year or so, a fresh occasion arises to gather in excitement about the Beatles. Last year’s Paul McCartney: Man on the Run doc captured the restlessness of the titular auteur during the ’70s as he chugged toward his 40th birthday, the disbanding of Wings, and the 1980 murder of his old songwriting partner John Lennon. Run did for McCartney’s Wings era what the restorations of Beatles films like 2021’s Get Back did for the band as a whole: It addressed and sometimes dispensed long-standing narratives — including that his immediate reaction to losing Lennon was cold — all the while ensuring the full story remains accessible to future generations. The yearslong project to continue circulating pristine footage and audio of anything pertaining to the Beatles is one of the most captivating campaigns like it this side of Taylor Swift’s meticulous rerecordings of herself. Sixty years after Revolver, Beatlemania is a never-ending flurry of idyllic remembrances of the past, a careful tugging at both heart- and purse strings. And that remains true with McCartney’s new elegant, self-referential full-length album, The Boys of Dungeon Lane.

Most people visit his contemporary work craving more of the melodic erudition and emotional accessibility found in his most arresting music with the Beatles, tentpoles like “Martha My Dear” and “Golden Slumbers”/“Carry That Weight.” He often delivers that — if he’s not preoccupied with dabbling in ambient music or proving he can do stately cabaret covers. McCartney has never seemed entirely comfortable resting on the laurels of the legacy cemented in his first arc as a professional musician. The acrimonious breakup of his breakthrough band was his license to branch out, an impetus to show he had more to offer. But the spirit of McCartney’s meticulous recent archival projects now informs the message of his new music. The Boys of Dungeon Lane, his 20th solo album, which takes its name from a short street near what’s now the Liverpool John Lennon Airport, is sort of like a Beatle prequel. At 83, the songwriter who wrongly imagined he’d be bald by now in “When I’m Sixty-Four” toasts to the bygone glory days and the postwar English mettle that made them possible, observing scenes from the first 30 years of his life in what may be its twilight. It’s his best stuff since the aughts run that yielded the stunning, resurgent Chaos and Creation in the Backyard and Memory Almost Full; excessive time in the back catalogue not only got him thinking about the past but also sharpening his present-day melodic instincts.

His May performance of Dungeon’s “Days We Left Behind” on Saturday Night Live quite literally surrounded the singer and bassist in photos from his past, cycling through smiling shots of McCartney, Lennon, and George Harrison in the infancy of their careers. The bittersweet single recalls the crew coming together in 1950s Liverpool but stops short of wishing McCartney could go back in time — the regretful reflection of “Yesterday” is replaced by genteel elderly bravado: “No one can erase / The days we left behind.” Working with producer-guitarist Andrew Watt, McCartney instead seems dedicated to pitching a new song or two alongside his pantheon of classics. Album opener “As You Lie There” is a showy multi-suite rocker, which suggests Watt has been pining for a shot at playing Wings’ “Live and Let Die” alongside its author: The folk intro turns out to be a feint as Watt’s howling electric guitar matches the singer’s intensifying lust for someone he must have met ages before his wife. “Salesman Saint” and “Momma Gets By” swing for the fences as they memorialize McCartney’s parents with plush big-band and orchestral arrangements that the couple might’ve enjoyed in their early-‘40s courtship. Following a melody from start to finish on this album is a riveting ride — “Mountain Top” cribs notes from the “Peter Cottontale” theme before tumbling through psychedelic reverie on the way to a loud hard-rock coda.

Dungeon makes wise use of Watt, a pop and rock Swiss Army Knife who’s increasingly in demand among rock octogenarians after his work on latter-day resurgences and returns to form for Iggy Pop, Ozzy Osbourne, Pearl Jam, and Elton John. These efforts can be tackily handled. Consider the video for the Rolling Stones’ chipper, paint-by-numbers recent single “In the Stars,” produced by Watt, which de-aged the band members with AI to look like they’re playing their tame comeback track in the room where Jean-Luc Godard filmed the making of 1968’s “Sympathy for the Devil.” Still, Watt, having played a lion’s share of the instruments on Osbourne’s 2020 album Ordinary Man and Pop’s 2023 album Every Loser, is establishing a reputation for providing rock veterans with simulacra of their staple sounds. At their best, the results can be rejuvenating, if a smidge too eager to rehash what has already worked. Loser, for example, dragged Pop off middling ambient music but lacked the teeth of his tracks with Queens of the Stone Age’s Josh Homme. However, McCartney runs the show here, offering a guided tour of his musical influences and predilections. Though Boys sometimes sees Watt take searing leads reminiscent of McCartney’s ’60s and ’70s guitar foils, like George Harrison, often, McCartney is playing almost everything himself. Dungeon hits as a byproduct of his previous album, 2020’s nearly one-man-band effort McCartney III. The new offering feels like more of a deeply considered statement than its exciting if imperfect predecessor, which was recorded during peak pandemic listlessness. Organized around the theme of closure, Dungeon is unafraid to send for orchestras, choirs, and more to knock us over the head with the question of whether we’re listening to a stylized good-bye.

Over the past few weeks, McCartney has stepped out at Apple’s 50th-anniversary party, honoring the company that was his business enemy for decades; shut the lights off in the Ed Sullivan Theater, where Beatlemania first caught fire in America, to close the Late Show With Stephen Colbert finale; and released a long-overdue Ringo duet with “Home to Us,” two old friends’ stomping love song to the city that raised them. These gestures make you wonder whether McCartney is planning on making it to the 2030s. Dungeon is an effective bit of Beatles-nostalgia-complex outreach because it’s difficult to tell whether we’re here to ponder mortality with someone who’s losing his peers faster and faster or to get a head start on obsessing over all the lore that’ll be pertinent to the 2028 wave of Beatle biopics, in which Paul Mescal will play McCartney. What’s clear is McCartney is back outside and on fire, pressing all the buttons available to an aging rock genius — lately, he’s been keeping live renditions of “Band on the Run,” from 1973’s Band on the Run, in a key that forces him to struggle a bit on the high notes. He’s playing points of strength and frailty like any of the other instruments he’s taught himself to pluck since playing skiffle in Merseyside family homes. If McCartney’s catalogue never received another new entry, he’d be closing it out exquisitely by reminiscing on the beginning.

Thank you for subscribing and supporting our journalism. If you prefer to read in print, you can also find this article in the June 15, 2026, issue of New York Magazine.

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