Paul McCartney has released The Boys from Dungeon Lane, his 27th studio album, and the record is built around a road name that reaches back to the Liverpool suburb where he spent his early childhood. The first single, Days We Left Behind, was premiered on Radio Merseyside, a debut that framed the album as both new work and another look into the past from a musician now 83 years old.
The album moves through songs that feel pulled from different corners of McCartney’s long career. Mountain Top, about a girl tripping on mushrooms at Glastonbury, comes with a harpsichord backing and production from Andrew Watt that adds phasing effects and looped spoken word. Momma Gets By revisits the territory of Lady Madonna, but in a less upbeat mode, while Life Can Be Hard is presented as an example of what John Lennon once called McCartney’s “granny music.” Ripples in a Pond, Come Inside and We Two round out a set that sounds less like a thesis than a scrapbook, and that is part of its appeal.
That looseness matters because McCartney has spent recent years revisiting pieces of his own history. The review notes renewed attention to the Let It Be sessions, a surviving Beatles reunion song he finished in the mid-90s, and a documentary about Wings, the band that made him hugely successful in the 1970s. The Boys from Dungeon Lane draws on that legacy without pretending to reorganize it into a grand statement. It is, by the review’s own description, not, by any stretch of the imagination, a concept album.
The title itself does some of the work the songs decline to do. By invoking the Liverpool street from his earliest years, McCartney is not just pointing back to childhood; he is anchoring the record in the geography that helped make him who he is. That gives the album a private cast even when the music reaches for jokes, oddball images and old melodic habits. McCartney’s own line, “Pumpkin pies in the skies also try to hypnotise,” lands in that space between whimsy and self-awareness, a reminder that he still writes as if rhyme, memory and mischief belong in the same room.
What gives The Boys from Dungeon Lane its force is the contrast between its age and its restlessness. McCartney is 83, but the album does not sound sealed off from risk or curiosity. It keeps circling familiar material — Liverpool, Beatles echoes, Wings, the nursery-rhyme warmth that Lennon mocked and fans still recognize immediately — and then nudges it into stranger shapes. The result is a record that looks backward without becoming stuck there, which is a harder trick than it sounds.
