Paul McCartney released his first studio work in nearly six years, The Boys of Dungeon Lane, one of the most anticipated albums of the year from one of the most scrutinized artists in the history of popular music. 🎵

The early reviews have been warmly positive, if carefully qualified. Alexis Petridis of The Guardian awarded it four out of five stars, calling it “wistful” and “lovely” and “as McCartney-esque as it’s possible to be.” The Associated Press gave it three out of five stars, calling it “a straightforward pop-rock disc—pleasant in spots, inoffensive in others.”

These new songs finding Paul in a candid, vulnerable, and deeply reflective mood, writing with rare openness about his childhood in post-war Liverpool, the resilience of his parents, and early adventures shared with George Harrison and John Lennon long before the world had ever heard of Beatlemania. That’s not press release boilerplate, it’s a description of specific thematic territory that McCartney has circled for decades without quite landing in the middle of until now. The title itself comes from a lyric McCartney used in a 1991 demo called “In Liverpool” that included the lines “Walking with the boys of Dungeon Lane / Aimlessly towards the cast iron shore”—an image he carried for thirty-five years before it became the organizing principle of an entire album.

Is this Paul’s swan song? Hell no, the guy lives to write and perform. He won’t quit until he’s taken his last breath.

The album was produced with Andrew Watt, whose collaboration with McCartney began five years ago over a cup of tea and an exchange of ideas. Playing around on the guitar during their first meeting, Paul happened upon a chord sequence he didn’t recognize, which Watt suggested they record immediately. That session produced the album’s opening track, “As You Lie There,” and McCartney played the majority of instruments throughout—much in the spirit of his 1970 solo debut.

The Voice

Now for the question that hovers over every McCartney release and every McCartney concert, the one that fans discuss with varying degrees of discomfort and critics address with varying degrees of tact: what about the voice?

The honest answer is that the reviews of “Days We Left Behind” are divided in ways that reflect a genuine underlying tension, not simply differing aesthetic preferences. One reviewer at The Musical Hype declared unambiguously that McCartney “does not miss a beat” and that “his voice sounds amazing, 83 years in.” That assessment appears to reflect what you hear when you’re listening with love for the man and gratitude for his continued existence rather than with analytical precision.

The more candid assessments come from the audiophile listener community. A review on Rate Your Music put it with uncomfortable specificity: the song is fine, and would have been one of the better tunes on Egypt Station or McCartney III—”but ugh. What is it with these elderly rock stars allowing their voices to be absolutely steamrolled to death by pitch correction?”

That critique cuts close to the real issue. The pitch correction is audible to trained ears, and it creates a specific uncanny quality—a voice that is technically on pitch but lacks the natural imperfections that make a human voice feel human. McCartney has made no secret of this; he’s openly admitted to utilizing pitch correction in the studio when he wants to quickly tweak a specific take he is otherwise happy with.

How does McCartney’s performances compare with other stars who’ve continued well past their prime? Consider Tony Bennett, who died in 2023 at ninety-six. He recorded his final album Love for Sale with Lady Gaga in 2021 while living with Alzheimer’s disease. His voice on those recordings was fragile, reduced, unmistakably aged—and devastating in its beauty precisely because of that fragility. He leaned into the “old man voice”, and the result was among the most moving music of his late career. The rawness was the point.

McCartney has made a different choice. He continues to perform “Maybe I’m Amazed” in the original key with pitch correction assistance. He continues to hit the high notes of “Hey Jude” at arena shows, with results that depend significantly on which night you attended. The “Got Back” tour—which ran through 2025 and featured a fifty-song setlist spanning the Beatles, Wings, and solo material—demonstrated McCartney’s continued capacity to engage audiences for two-plus-hour sets despite his age, maintaining vocal stamina that just astonishes.

Rod Stewart, his contemporary, has been more openly candid about working within his vocal limitations as he’s aged. Bob Dylan abandoned any pretense of technical vocal quality decades ago and built an artistic identity around the character of his deteriorated voice. Johnny Cash made some of his most powerful music in the last years of his life precisely because he allowed the damage and the age to be audible. McCartney’s instinct has been to fight the process rather than work with it, and the pitch correction on “Days We Left Behind” is the latest expression of that instinct.

What Still Works

None of this diminishes what McCartney remains at eighty-three: the most productive and commercially successful older musician in popular culture, still writing original material, still performing two-hour shows, still generating genuine anticipation for a new album. He’s not what he used to be, but he still brings more joy to more people than perhaps any other musician. He recently played two- and three-night stands at the Bowery Ballroom and the Fonda Theatre—intimate venues of 575 and 1,200 capacity respectively, where there is nowhere to hide—with demand that dwarfed supply in both cases. That is not the career trajectory of a legacy act coasting on nostalgia. That is an eighty-three-year-old man who loves performing, and who people genuinely want to hear.

The songwriting, importantly, appears undiminished. The Boys of Dungeon Lane is musically eclectic, seeing Paul across an array of instruments and styles—Wings-style rock, Beatles-style harmonies, McCartney-style grooves, understated intimacy, melody. The themes—memory, aging, childhood, the passage of time—are not the themes of a man grasping for relevance but of one finally willing to sit still with his own history and examine it honestly. That is arguably the most interesting creative development of his late career, more interesting than any individual note he may or may not hit cleanly.