A secret song, a new album — why it’s going to be a Rolling Stones summer
If a new track from ‘the Cockroaches’ sounds awfully like Mick Jagger, that’s because it is. Will Hodgkinson reports on the Stones’ latest comeback — and asks whether they will play live again

Will Hodgkinson, Chief Rock and Pop Critic
Thursday April 09 2026, 10.00pm BST, The Times


On Thursday morning someone — let’s call him a crazy fan — played me a song by a mysterious band called the Cockroaches. This came after posters for the group, named after a legendarily hardy insect, appeared around Camden Town, north London. Getting going with an electric blues riff not a million miles from the one that starts up Start Me Up by the Rolling Stones, Rough and Twisted builds with a bit of soloing from a second guitar, a primeval thud from the drums and the unmistakable yowl of one of the most famous singers in the world. He’s asking for someone to drive him down a rough and twisted road all the way to Puerto Rico, where the tide ebbs and flows and you do feel that something sexual may be happening along the way. Yes, if you haven’t guessed already, ol’ Rubber Lips and the gang are back.

Rough and Twisted, available as a vinyl-only “white label” release from April 11, is classic Stones: a killer riff, a rambunctious harmonica solo from Mick Jagger, a devil-may-care spirit and the feeling that, six decades on from first crawling out of a notoriously squalid flat in Edith Grove, southwest London, to play the blues in smoke-clogged pubs and clubs along the Surrey Delta, the Rolling Stones are still a chaotic bar band forever on the verge of collapse, happiest in the most low-down dives. As Jagger sings, “You just took me to a flyblown town in the middle of nowhere. The smell was acrid and toxic. Couldn’t breathe the air.”

-snip-

Rough and Twisted paves the way for an as-yet-unnamed Rolling Stones album coming out in July. Like 2023’s Hackney Diamonds, it was recorded with Andrew Watt. The 35-year-old New Yorker started out playing guitar and co-songwriting for pop acts such as Justin Bieber and Miley Cyrus but his love of classic rock led to him producing albums by Ozzy Osbourne and Iggy Pop before falling into the Stones camp.

When I spoke to the Stones in 2023 they all said Watt’s enthusiasm was galvanising. It explains why he has been asked back — that and the fact that Hackney Diamonds was their biggest commercial and critical hit in years, going to No 1 in 20 countries and selling more than a million copies. Watt has also produced a forthcoming Paul McCartney album, due for release in late May. This means that in the absence of Glastonbury this year, a Beatle and the Stones will be dominating the summer music schedule, bringing a much-needed dose of Sixties spirit to our less than love-infused modern age.

-snip-

-snip-

First, the good news. It may be too simplistic and overfamiliar to rank amongst the Stones’ all-time classics, but it’s a stomping, raucous, frayed and tattered blues belter that sounds like the surviving trio are still having more fun than any of the million noisy rock bands who have trailed in their wake. It features Ronnie Wood’s wailing slide guitar, Keith Richards’s riff that moves with a glam-rock stomp, and Mick Jagger’s rasping, hooting harmonica that sucks the breath out of all the spaces between. It would be hard to deny that it was the Stones from the instrumental opening bars, and any lingering doubts are blown away as soon as Jagger starts honking and howling over the top.

The lyrics improbably cast the 82-year-old rock superstar as a wide-eyed innocent led astray by a devilish tempter, who promised him he would “dance like Nijinsky” in “Sicily and Rome” but traps him in “a club called Conspiracy” in a “fly-blown town” in the “back of nowhere”. Snarling that all his audience wants is “tyranny / And all that crazy, crazy f---ed up stuff”, Jagger hints at a political dimension, but he makes the whole thing sound more like a raunchy sexual misadventure because, well, that’s what he does.

The sound is thick and dense, featuring Richards at his most simplistically grungy, topped off with the interplay of Woods’s nimble slide (with shades of George Thorogood, who was once considered a candidate for the Stones’ second guitar role) and Jagger’s wheezy blues harp. It’s reminiscent of Black Limousine from the Stones’ 1981 album Tattoo You, but with more power and crunch.

Rough and Twisted is not likely to be celebrated as a Stones classic. Indeed, it is barely a song at all, just a pile-driving shift through blues phrases. But it is exciting, full of energy and joy. If it popped up in the middle of their unbeatable 1972 album Exile on Main Street, you wouldn’t kick it out of the château.

-snip-