Lady Gaga Joins the Rolling Stones on Stage in NYC for Surprise Album Launch Party

Fifty-nine years after Decca Records proclaimed England’s Newest Hit Makers had arrived on American soil, the Rolling Stones returned to the United States on Thursday (Oct. 19) to launch their latest album, Hackney Diamonds.

“It seems we always launch our albums in New York,” Mick Jagger told the crowd at the Racket, an intimate New York City venue that’s taken over the Highline Ballroom space. “We’ve done it in a blimp. We’ve done it on a flatbed truck going down 5th avenue,” he said, reading from a Teleprompter. “We were missing launches so much that we had to make another album and come back and re-launch it.”

The Andrew Watt-co-produced Hackney Diamonds has been a long time coming, with the rock n’ roll legends hashing it as early as their 2016 blues covers album Blue & Lonesome. It’s their 26th album released in America, and first since the death of drummer Charlie Watts. But the launch party was filled with the reckless, live-for-the-moment energy that characterizes classic LPs from Out of Our Heads to Sticky Fingers.

During their seven-song set – which kicked off with “Shattered,” the Stones’ punk/disco dispatch from NYC hedonism in the late ‘70s – it was abundantly clear that the Rolling Stones did, in fact, need to make another album, if only to play it live. While it’s unlikely that Diamonds joints will become live staples in the vein of “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” and “Tumbling Dice” (both performed at the show), tackling new songs such as “Angry” and “Bite My Head Off” clearly gave Jagger, Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood the hopeful expectancy that comes with performing material that isn’t an easy slam-dunk in the vein of “Flash.” As a result, they sold the hell of the new stuff, ripping through the new songs with an urgency that’s bound to get lost when you’re doing a song for the 500th time.

For a Stones underplay in a New York venue of a few hundred people, the crowd was naturally dotted with celebrities: Jimmy Fallon, Mary Kate Olsen, Chris Rock, Daniel Craig, Elvis Costello, Diana Krall and Questlove (the pre- and post-show DJ) were all present. Costello nodded along sagely to the music and exchanged bon mots with wife Krall; Fallon headbanged and sang along; Olsen took a smoke break.

For the first three songs of the night, Lady Gaga was on the sidelines, but when the Stones came out for their encore, she was front and center, delivering their new collaborative track “Sweet Sounds of Heaven,” easily the highlight of the night. Wearing a red-and-black sequined body suit, Gaga traded full-throated vocal runs with Jagger on gospel-tinged track. You might not expect an 80-year-old who’s had heart valve replacement surgery to be able to go toe-to-toe with an artist who is probably the most effortlessly talented live performer of our era, but Jagger was clearly jazzed by the energy of the crowd, the pinch-me enthusiasm of Gaga and the jolt of performing new material.

Who knows how much longer the Stones can roll on, but based on their NYC album launch party, we’re lucky that England’s veteran hitmakers haven’t yet called it a day.

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