A new social media post from Paul McCartney seems to hint that a brand-new Beatles Anthology release is on the horizon.
Granted, Macca’s Instagram post is cryptic, but the clues are promising. There’s no caption; it simply shows a quartet of images featuring white backgrounds, and the numbers one to four, colored by some of the band’s instantly recognizable artwork, including snippets of the Yellow Submarine and Sgt. Pepper's album covers.
Notably, the images featured in the post closely resemble collages that featured across the previous 1990s Anthology releases. Consequently, fans are convinced that it points toward another multimedia anthology project.
The Anthology series began 30 years ago, in 1995, as a retrospective project comprising a television documentary, a three-volume set of double albums, and a book charting the Fab Four’s celebrated history.
For hardcore fans, the albums — titled Anthology 1, 2 and 3 — were the holy grail, containing live cuts, alternate takes of classic tracks, unreleased material, outtakes, interviews and images dating back to the group's early pre-fame days.
The fact that McCartney’s post features four images in its carousel isn’t lost on the Beatles fanbase.
If confirmed, it will be the most significant movement from the Beatles camp since the AI-powered single, “Now and Then,” which was released in 2023 and fixed a glitch in their back catalog in the process. Lennon’s widow, Yoko Ono, had given the band’s surviving members the original “Now and Then” demo in 1994, but the band had opted not to include it in those mid-’90s releases.
Two new songs, “Real Love” and “Free as a Bird,” were featured in the original Anthology series, making those tunes the first new music to come from the band since the 1980 murder of John Lennon. Both songs were written and recorded by the guitarist in the late ‘70s, representing some of the final material he produced.
McCartney's post comes amid other interesting developments in Beatles folklore. Elliot Mintz’s recent appearance on Billy Corgan’s The Magnificent Others podcast has offered an alternative timeline to John Lennon and Paul McCartney’s final ever meeting, two years after they were believed to have last crossed paths.
Elsewhere, a recently unearthed George Harrison interview from 1981 finds him discussing the powers of comedy in adjusting to life after the Beatles, and Guitar Player has reflected on how an unreleased John Lennon demo saw three-quarters of the Beatles write a song together again for the first time since their split.
McCartney wrapped his mammoth Get Back tour last year with his recently rediscovered Höfner violin bass getting its first live appearance in 50 years, with a little help from Ronnie Wood.
