New (2013)

 


  1. Save Us
  2. Alligator
  3. On My Way To Work
  4. Queenie Eye
  5. Early Days
  6. New
  7. Appreciate
  8. Everybody Out There
  9. Hosanna
  10.I Can Bet
  11.Looking At Her
  12.Road

 

An apt title, if ever there was one. Though Wow might have worked just as well. After 2008’s Memory Almost Full — a reflective, often autumnal record that seemed to gently gesture at finality — no one would have faulted McCartney for laying down his pen. It had the air of a swan song, the sigh of a man taking stock and tipping his hat to the audience. But five years later, and at the improbable age of 71, McCartney returned with New — a record as fresh, vibrant, and sonically youthful as anything he’d made since the early 1980s.

If Kisses on the Bottom was McCartney leaning into nostalgia with a wink and a bow tie, New was the complete about-face — an album pulsing with energy, color, and a palpable sense of creative mischief. One would be forgiven for assuming it came from a man half his age. The melodies are immediate, the production sharp, and McCartney’s vocals — remarkably — still strong and agile. No croaking elder statesman here; he sounds, quite honestly, like he’s having fun.

The record is classic late-era McCartney: quirky, occasionally oddball, restless in tone but unified in spirit. Queenie Eye is the kind of singalong anthem that only he could write, while Appreciate leans into a darker, moodier groove with surprising ease. The title track, New, is a pure pop gem — cheerful, layered, and effortlessly memorable. In fact, much of the album proves impossibly catchy, a quality McCartney has always worn lightly, as though melody were something that simply occurred to him between tea breaks.

Despite employing a rotating cast of modern producers (including Mark Ronson and Giles Martin), the album manages a surprising cohesion. Sonically adventurous yet thematically grounded, New feels like the work of a single unified vision — another hallmark of McCartney’s finest solo records.

The lone outlier is Early Days, a wistful acoustic ballad that reminisces on McCartney’s youthful years in Liverpool and Hamburg. It's the sort of number that might have felt more at home on Flaming Pie, or even Chaos and Creation in the Backyard, but its gentle sincerity earns its place. In lesser hands it might feel like sentimental filler; here, it feels like a breather between the kinetic bursts that surround it.

There will always be those who view the 1960s as the golden years, and understandably so. But McCartney’s late-career catalogue is quietly making a case of its own. Since the turn of the millennium, his output has been — if not consistently brilliant — far more vital than anyone had the right to expect. New is proof that McCartney, even in his seventies, was still evolving, still curious, and still capable of delivering music that felt, in every sense, alive.

It’s hard to say what’s more surprising: that he made a record this good at 71, or that he made it sound so easy. Somewhere, Vera, Chuck and Dave are still waiting.

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