More than sixty years into their career, the Rolling Stones are still making records – and, remarkably, still making good ones. The band has released Foreign Tongues, its 25th British studio album, a fast, muscular set that extends the late-career revival they kicked off with 2023’s Hackney Diamonds.
Produced once again by Andrew Watt, Foreign Tongues was recorded in London in a burst of energy the band describes as a month of concentrated work. The result is 14 tracks that show a group with nothing left to prove still finding reasons to plug in – and a guest list that reads like a who’s-who of popular music.
For a band whose members are now in their eighties, the very existence of a vital new album is a story in itself. That it is genuinely good is what turns a footnote into an event.
A Fast, Focused Record
Speed is central to the album’s character. The Stones cut the record at West London’s Metropolis Studios in less than a month, chasing spontaneity rather than polish. “It was a very intense few weeks recording Foreign Tongues,” Mick Jagger said. “We had 14 great tracks, and we went as fast as we could.”
Keith Richards framed it in his own inimitable terms. “The Foreign Tongues album has a continuity from Hackney Diamonds, and it was great to be working in London again, and to have that London vibe around us,” he said. “It was a month of concentrated punch.” That approach – quick, live, unfussy – is exactly the method that has always suited the band, and it gives the album a loose, in-the-room energy.
The pair also let slip a couple of playful details along the way. One of the singles, Rough and Twisted, had already crept out weeks earlier in a tiny physical run under the deliberately disposable pseudonym The Cockroaches – the kind of low-key prank a band of the Stones’ stature can indulge in when it feels like it. It is a small thing, but it captures the spirit of the sessions: loose, quick and clearly enjoyed rather than laboured over.
A Stacked Guest List
One of the record’s most eye-catching features is who turns up on it. The album features contributions from an extraordinary roster: Paul McCartney, Bruno Mars, Robert Smith of The Cure, Steve Winwood, Benmont Tench and Chad Smith, among others, alongside the band’s regular collaborators, drummer Steve Jordan and bassist Darryl Jones.
That kind of guest list is a testament to the Stones’ standing. Few acts could summon a Beatle, a modern pop superstar and a gothic-rock icon to the same album, and the range of names hints at the album’s stylistic breadth. Rather than diluting the band’s identity, the guests orbit it – the Stones remain unmistakably the Stones, with the visitors adding colour at the edges.
The Paul McCartney appearance carries its own weight. The old rivalry-turned-friendship between the Beatles and the Stones is one of rock’s foundational stories, and to have a surviving Beatle guesting on a Stones album this late in the game reads almost like a summit of the two bands that defined the 1960s. That such collaborations are still happening – and being documented on record – gives Foreign Tongues a sense of occasion beyond its individual songs.
Continuity From Hackney Diamonds
Foreign Tongues does not exist in isolation. As Richards noted, it flows directly from Hackney Diamonds, the acclaimed 2023 album that marked the band’s first set of original material in nearly two decades and reintroduced them, improbably, as a going concern rather than a heritage act.
Producer Andrew Watt is the link. A generation younger than the band, Watt has made a speciality of coaxing fresh, contemporary records out of rock veterans, and his return behind the desk signals that Hackney Diamonds was no fluke. Two strong albums in three years, after such a long drought of new material, amounts to a genuine late-period run – the kind most bands half their age never manage.
Part of what makes the run possible is a clear division of labour that has settled over the band. With Steve Jordan now the drummer and Watt shaping the sound in the studio, Jagger and Richards are free to focus on what they do best – writing, singing and playing – without carrying every logistical burden themselves. It is a model that lets a group in its ninth decade keep working at pace, and it helps explain how an album this substantial could come together in a matter of weeks.
A Song With Charlie Watts
Amid the energy runs a thread of poignancy. The album includes a song recorded with Charlie Watts, the band’s beloved drummer, before his death in 2021. His presence is a reminder of what the group has lost, and of the deep well of unreleased work that a partnership spanning six decades leaves behind.
For longtime fans, hearing Watts on a new Stones record is a bittersweet gift. It ties Foreign Tongues to the band’s history even as the album pushes forward, and it lends the whole project a quiet emotional weight beneath the swagger – a sense of a group honouring its past while refusing to be defined only by it.
The Sound
Musically, Foreign Tongues covers a lot of ground in its 14 tracks. There are the joint-rattling rockers the band built its name on, in songs like Hit Me in the Head and Rough and Twisted, and sweeping ballads including Richards’ well-received Some of Us. Elsewhere it turns to disco-tinged heartbreak on Jealous Lover and Never Wanna Lose You, a country lope on Ringing Hollow, and a reverent nod to their roots in a cover of Chuck Berry’s Beautiful Delilah.
That breadth is the point. The Stones have always been magpies, absorbing blues, country, disco and pure rock and roll and stamping it all with their own attitude. Foreign Tongues plays like a summation of that instinct – a band drawing on everything it has ever loved, unhurried and unbothered by fashion, simply making the kind of music it wants to make.
Still Rolling
There is an obvious temptation to treat any new Rolling Stones album as a novelty – proof the veterans can still do it – and to grade it gently. The more interesting truth is that Foreign Tongues does not need the handicap. It stands on its own as a lively, varied rock record, the second in a strong late run.
It also lands in a moment when the return of the veteran icon is very much in vogue, from these sessions to another beloved star’s own dance-floor homecoming this month. For the Stones, though, the framing is almost beside the point. Six decades on, they are still writing, still recording, still touring – and, with Foreign Tongues, still worth listening to. Few careers in any art form have lasted so long or ended so far from their finish line.
