Looking Back at Rolling Stones' Best Album: 'Some Girls'

Analog Living — Source: Lauren Smith plays The Rolling Stones record, “Some Girls” on her record player above her collections of 12″ inch vinyl records in her living room in Chicago, IL, on Tuesday, May 23rd, 2023. Photographed on a Kodak FunSaver 35mm Disposable Camera. (Mary Mathis for The Washington Post via Getty Images)

Some Girls (released this week in 1978) stands as The Rolling Stones’ best album because it captures the band at a perfect crossroad; raw, reinvigorated and fiercely relevant. Coming off a string of uneven releases and facing the rise of punk and disco, the Stones responded not by clinging to the past, but by evolving. Some Girls is a defiant, swaggering record that blends rock, punk, disco and country music with unapologetic grit.

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The album opens with Miss You, a chart-topping disco-infused track that showed the band could adapt without compromising their identity. Beast of Burden is one of their most emotionally resonant ballads, while Respectable and Shattered channel the sneering energy of punk. Mick Jagger’s vocals are razor-sharp throughout, dripping with sarcasm, lust and weariness—a reflection of late-70s New York, where much of the album’s energy is rooted.

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Keith Richards, despite his legal troubles, delivers some of his tightest playing, especially on Before They Make Me Run, a defiant anthem of survival. Ronnie Wood, now a full-time member, adds gritty slide guitar and sharp textures that helped reshape the Stones’ sound for a new era.

Lyrically, Some Girls is provocative, often controversial, but always biting—a social snapshot of the time.

Unlike other classic Stones albums, this one doesn’t just rest on blues roots; it challenges and reinvents them. Its fearless experimentation, urban grit, and renewed urgency make Some Girls not just a comeback, but The Rolling Stones’ most complete and dynamic statement.