Paul McCartney Announces First New Solo Album in Five Years: The Boys of Dungeon Lane

There are albums that entertain, albums that endure, and then — very rarely — albums that reveal. The Boys of Dungeon Lane, Paul McCartney’s 18th solo studio record, is emphatically the latter. Due out May 29 via MPL/Capitol Records, it marks the legendary songwriter’s most personal collection in a career that has already rewritten the boundaries of what popular music can be.

This is the first new solo album from McCartney in over five years, and it arrives not with the fanfare of a comeback, but with the quiet authority of a man who has nothing left to prove — and everything left to say.

The album’s title is drawn from a lyric in the lead single, Days We Left Behind — available now — a stripped-back, deeply intimate track that sets the emotional tone for everything that follows. Dungeon Lane is a real street near McCartney’s childhood home in Speke, Liverpool, and it serves as a symbolic threshold: the place where a boy who would change the world was still just a boy.

“I was thinking just that, about the days I left behind,” McCartney explains. “It’s just a lot of memories of Liverpool. It involves a bit in the middle about John and Forthlin Road, which is the street I used to live in… We didn’t have much at all but it didn’t matter because all the people were great and you didn’t notice you didn’t have much.”

Before the Story Began

What makes The Boys of Dungeon Lane so extraordinary is that it takes listeners somewhere they have never been before — into the unguarded, pre-fame years that historians have long examined but McCartney has never fully opened up about. Afternoons along the Mersey with a birdwatching book, smoky bars and cheap guitars, early afternoons spent at Forthlin Road with John Lennon and George Harrison, long before any of them imagined the world would one day know their names.

These are not myths or folklore. They are his own memories, revisited with rare candour and — in equal measure — new love songs delivered in that instantly recognisable McCartney warmth. The result is an album that exists in two beautiful registers at once: deeply nostalgic, and unmistakably alive.

Five Years in the Making

The album’s origins trace back to a single cup of tea. Five years ago, McCartney sat down with producer Andrew Watt and, mid-conversation, stumbled upon a guitar chord he didn’t recognise. Rather than dismiss it, he kept going — changing one note, then another — until he had a three-chord sequence. That moment became the album’s opening track, As You Lie There.

Recorded across Los Angeles and Sussex in tight sessions between global tour legs, the album was made entirely on McCartney’s own terms — no record label pressure, no deadline. He plays the majority of instruments himself, nodding to the spirit of his 1970 self-titled debut. The result is musically eclectic: Wings-style rock, Beatles-style harmonies, understated grooves, character songs, melody-driven storytelling. The common thread, as ever, is Paul.

Track Listing

1. As You Lie There
2. Lost Horizon
3. Days We Left Behind
4. Ripples in a Pond
5. Mountain Top
6. Down South
7. We Two
8. Come Inside
9. Never Know
10. Home to Us
11. Life Can Be Hard
12. First Star of the Night
13. Salesman Saint
14. Momma Gets By

The Boys of Dungeon Lane is available to pre-order now. The lead single Days We Left Behind is out now on all streaming platforms.

Photograph: Mary McCartney © 2026