“Rocks Off” by The Rolling Stones

"Rocks Off" kicks the door in on the Rolling Stones' 1972 double album Exile on Main St., and it sounds exactly like a band that spent months holed up somewhere with the tape rolling. Part of it was cut at Villa Nellcôte, the house Keith Richards rented in the south of France in 1971, and the overdubs and final mix were done later at Sunset Sound in Los Angeles, with Jimmy Miller producing.

Mick Jagger's vocal is buried so deep in the murk that the words are hard to catch, and they drift toward a numb, detached headspace like a needle's aftermath. A little past the two-minute mark the song lurches into a woozy psychedelic haze, Jagger phased and warped, the guitar chords smeared out, and all the while the mix wanders haphazardly, instruments surfacing and sinking like swimmers in a murky pool.

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