Paul McCartney’s ‘Boys of Dungeon Lane’ Special Edition Arrives Today With Four New Recordings

LONDON — Paul McCartney is not done with The Boys of Dungeon Lane yet. The Special Edition of his 18th solo album arrives on streaming and download today, October 7, 2026, adding four recordings to the 14-track album released May 29: three brand-new songs — “City Fox,” “One Night Stand,” and “Chelsea Boots” — and a “flip mix” of “Home to Us” that swaps the vocal parts of McCartney and Ringo Starr. That last detail is the one that stops you cold. The two surviving Beatles recorded their first full duet on this album, trading verses heavy with sixty years of shared history — and now we get to hear it with their roles reversed, Ringo singing Paul’s lines and Paul singing Ringo’s.

It is, frankly, a lovely idea, and the kind of thing only McCartney would think to do at 84: take one of the most emotionally loaded recordings of his late career and turn it into a game of musical chairs. The Special Edition was announced last week, and per the official press release all four recordings come from the 2021–2025 sessions with producer Andrew Watt that produced the original album. The tracklist grows from 14 songs to 18.

The duetHow “Home to Us” happened

The story behind the duet is almost as good as the song. McCartney had asked Starr to cut a drum track with Watt for “Home to Us,” and Ringo sent back a version with a few added lines on the chorus. Paul thought Ringo didn’t like the song. He rang him up, and Ringo said he’d assumed Paul only wanted a line or two — so Paul asked him to sing the whole thing, and suddenly they had a duet. As McCartney told Rolling Stone: they’d never done that before. Six decades, four lads, thousands of songs — and Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr had never properly traded verses on a record until this year.

The flip mix is the coda to that story. What Starr sang, McCartney now sings; what McCartney sang, Starr now sings. On paper it sounds like a novelty. In practice, on a song about two men trading lyrics that, the press release said, “carry the weight of their extraordinary shared history while remaining deeply personal and contemporary,” hearing the other voice carry your line is going to land differently. This is the track to play first.

The new songsThree more from the Watt sessions

Alongside the flip mix come three songs nobody has heard: “City Fox,” “One Night Stand,” and “Chelsea Boots.” They were cut during the same 2021–2025 sessions with Watt — the hitmaker behind the recent Stones and Ozzy records — that yielded the album’s original 14 tracks, and the press release said they were more dispatches “from the world of The Boys of Dungeon Lane” rather than leftovers. Given how fully formed the May album felt, that’s a high bar, but Watt’s track record with late-career legends suggests these weren’t held back for lack of quality.

The titles alone are doing storytelling work. “Chelsea Boots” all but announces itself as a period piece — the boots were the uniform of the early-sixties Liverpool and London scene McCartney has been excavating across this whole project. “City Fox” sounds like the wry observer song; “One Night Stand” could be anything from a rocker to a rueful ballad. We’ll know by tonight.

The year it’s beenNumber ones and a Mercury nod

Step back and look at the year The Boys of Dungeon Lane has had. Released May 29 — his first studio album since McCartney III in 2020 — it debuted at No. 1 in the UK, his 24th UK No. 1 album across his career as a Beatle, a Wing, and a solo artist, with top-five debuts in more than a dozen countries and a No. 5 bow in the US on Billboard. Then in July came the nomination that genuinely surprised people: the album made the 12-album Mercury Prize shortlist, McCartney’s first-ever Mercury nomination in a career spanning six decades. The ceremony is October 23 in Newcastle — sixteen days from now, with four new songs suddenly in the conversation.

He’s been working the album like it matters to him, too — a run of exclusive playback events where fans heard the record in full, in rooms small enough for the stories behind the songs. For an artist who could fill stadiums on muscle memory, the intimacy of this campaign has been the tell: this is the record he wanted to talk about.

The packageMarble vinyl and a Kate Gibb collage

For the collectors — and with McCartney, the collectors are legion — the December 9 physical edition is the event. The Special Edition gets new cover artwork adapted from a silkscreened collage by Kate Gibb, built from more than 100 images from McCartney’s personal collection. The limited double LP comes as an orange-and-blue marble pressing with a zoetrope etching, and there’s a CD for the rest of us. Pre-orders are already live.

A zoetrope etching on a McCartney record in 2026. The man understands the assignment: give people something they can hold, something that moves when it spins. In a year when the album earned him his first Mercury nod at 84, the victory lap is allowed to be beautiful.

The songsThe story before the story

What the album is actually about: the years before everything changed. McCartney has described the record as the most personal story he’s told — childhood in post-war Liverpool, his parents’ resilience, early adventures with George Harrison and John Lennon long before Beatlemania. The title comes from “Days We Left Behind,” a stripped-back memory song built around Dungeon Lane, near Forthlin Road where he grew up in working-class Speke. As he put it in the press release, it’s a song about wondering whether he’s just writing about the past — and concluding, how can you write about anything else?

That’s the thread the four new recordings extend. “This is the story before THE story,” the announcement said. “And there is still more to tell.” At 84, with a chart-topper, a Mercury nomination, and a duet with Ringo that he then flipped inside out just to see what it sounds like — the telling, clearly, isn’t finished. Stream the Special Edition today; the marble vinyl lands December 9.