Can we stop calling every Rolling Stones album their best since Some Girls?

The minute The Rolling Stones announced their new album, Hackney Diamonds, one knew what would come next: someone, somewhere would pronounce it “their best album since Some Girls”. And, lo, it came to pass: The Times, which was granted an early preview prior to all other publications, duly did so. The same newspaper also called the last Stones album, 2016’s Blue and Lonesome, “the best Stones album since Some Girls”.

Every album the Stones have released in the past 40 years has been described as their best since Some Girls (with the solitary exception of 1994’s Voodoo Lounge; though it’s likely that the one that did just evaded my Google search). Dirty Work (1986) received the accolade from Robert Christgau, the self-styled “dean of American rock criticism” as well as The New York Times; A Bigger Bang was hailed as such by Variety and the Village Voice. Jann Wenner, the professional rock sycophant who ran Rolling Stone for many years, went so far as to say Mick Jagger’s distinctly iffy 2001 solo album Goddess in the Doorway “surpasses all his solo work and any Rolling Stones album since Some Girls”.

Clearly, they can’t all have been the best Stones album since Some Girls, otherwise the Stones would have been on a continuing upward trajectory since 1983, which sadly but evidently just isn’t the case. The “best since” phenomenon isn’t unique to the Stones: for many years, every David Bowie album was applauded as his best since Scary Monsters (1980); Neil Young has had years of releasing his best record since Rust Never Sleeps (1979); with Bob Dylan, it’s often his best since 1975’s Blood on the Tracks.

Why, in the wake of all available evidence, do critics and fans persist in this meaningless practice? The “best since” notion usually emerges not long after a high point, especially one followed by lows. There’s still hope that the artist will reconquer the high ground – or, in music critic lore, “return to form”. The writer, usually a fan, has an emotional investment in them doing so. No one wants to admit that the artist they invested so much time, emotion and money in is now a busted flush.

It’s not dissimilar in sports, where veteran players – clearly way past their best – are routinely lauded by pundits for their “intelligence” and “experience” and the example they set for younger players, even as those who watch them every week can see they’re two yards off the pace and increasingly resembling one of the fathers in a Dads vs Lads game.

For the record, I have not yet heard Hackney Diamonds, just the two songs that have been released so far. To me, “Sweet Sounds of Heaven” and “Angry” – a bluesy ballad, and a stomping rocker, respectively – sound perfectly fine (though the light touch of Charlie Watts’s drumming is missed in the latter. But you wouldn’t want either of them to replace anything on Exile on Main St (1972), Sticky Fingers (1971), or Let It Bleed (1969). Come release day next Friday, it may transpire that indeed it is their best since Some Girls, but given that Some Girls wasn’t a patch on those late Sixties and early Seventies albums, it’s a bit like saying that the Chicken Cottage burger and chips you had last night was the best dinner you’d had since your Big Mac Meal.

It’s a dereliction of critical duty to overpraise art, even if almost all critics do it. No one is desperate to be the person to call out a beloved institution, but they must. I’m an obsessive reader of espionage fiction, and year after year I would buy the latest John Le Carré novel, having seen reviews lauding it as the equal of his Smiley novels. And every time I was disappointed; by the end of his career I was disgusted. The books were not only not as good as the Smiley novels, they were authentically awful by anyone’s standards (even the last top-notch Le Carré in 1986, A Perfect Spy, was starting to show the cracks where he plainly no longer knew how people actually spoke to one another). But almost no one was willing to say so in public. Let alone in a newspaper. The first piece that comes up when I search for reviews of Agent Running in the Field (2019) is from The Observer, and it claims: “Agent Running is right on the money, in psychology as much as politics, a demonstration of the British spy thriller at its unputdownable best.” I promise you, it is not. It is awful.

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It’s perhaps more of an acute problem in the book world, where most people still spend 20 quid to buy a new novel. In music, at least, they can stream the thing before deciding whether it’s worth forking out on it. And one might argue that “best since Some Girls” has long been priced into people’s assessments of Stones albums, and so it doesn’t really matter whether it’s true or not. Well, it matters because it diminishes whatever trust in critics remains: if they can’t tell the truth about how good an album is, why believe them when they really mean it?

In more exciting news, though, AC/DC returned to the stage last week, their first live performance with Brian Johnson singing since 2016. I hope they record a new album; I reckon it might turn out to be their best since Back in Black.