A Bigger Bang by The Rolling Stones

A Bigger Bang, the Rolling Stones' album of 5 September 2005 on Virgin, is the band deciding they'd had enough of overthinking it. Bridges to Babylon, eight years earlier, had been a sprawl of producers, styles and guests; this time Mick Jagger and Keith Richards brought in just one outside producer, Don Was, and set out to make a plain, hard rock record that called back to their heyday of the '60s and '70s.

Most of the basic tracks were laid down by a stripped-down trio of Jagger, Richards and Charlie Watts, with Ronnie Wood, bassist Darryl Jones, keyboard man Chuck Leavell and Matt Clifford piling on later, and the thing crackles with that bare-bones urgency. It was the last album of original songs with Watts drumming all the way through before his death in 2021. Critics didn't mistake it for the classic years, but it was among the best-received of their late records, went to number one in eleven countries, and launched a two-year tour that became the highest-grossing ever, caught on film by Martin Scorsese in Shine a Light.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.