New Rolling Stones album coming ‘this year,’ Ron Wood says

The Rolling Stones appear to be on track to release the group’s first new studio album in more than a decade later this year, Stones guitarist Ron Wood said Monday.

“We went in to cut some new songs, which we did,” Wood told the Associated Press in London, at the opening of a new exhibition exploring the band’s long history. “But we got on a blues streak. We cut 11 blues [songs] in two days.”

The Stones’ most recent studio album, “A Bigger Bang,” was released in 2005.

Wood said the band recorded “extremely great cover versions of Howlin’ Wolf and Little Walter, among other blues people. But they really sound authentic.”

As for the timing of when those recordings might be released, Wood said “This year.”

“We’re a working band,” he added. “We’ll be working again before the end of the year.”

Following Wood’s remarks, a spokesperson for the Stones told The Times that the album is “at demo stage.”

If a strongly blues-based album is released, it would be something many fans have been longing for the group to make.

“The Stones should just go in and do a blues album,” Elton John told The Times earlier this year. “I don’t know if Mick would go for it, but Keith would love that.”

The band just returned from its first performance in Cuba, a free concert in Havana that drew hundreds of thousands of Cubans to hear music once decried by the country’s communist leadership.

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