Less than three years after the Grammy Award-winning Hackney Diamonds reignited a global conversation about one of rock’s most enduring legacies, The Rolling Stones have returned with Foreign Tongues — a 14-track studio album that does something remarkable: it makes the argument that the band is not merely surviving, but genuinely thriving.
Recorded in under a month at Metropolis Studios in West London with Grammy-winning producer Andrew Watt — who also helmed Hackney Diamonds — the album crackles with the kind of urgency that tends to elude artists deep into their sixth decade of making records. Mick Jagger has spoken openly about setting a tight timeline for the sessions, and that sense of concentrated energy translates directly into the music. There is no padding here, no filler — just fourteen songs that move with purpose and conviction.
The album opens with Rough and Twisted, a swampy, slow-burning blues built around a wandering road metaphor, introduced ahead of release under the alias The Cockroaches on limited edition white label vinyl. It’s a declaration of intent: gritty, unhurried, rooted in the band’s earliest influences. From there, In The Stars pivots to anthemic pop/rock — a chorus built to last, with the hook “It’s in the stars, it’s our destiny” arriving with the confidence of a band that knows exactly how to make a hit. Jealous Lover, the lead single, is arguably the album’s most commercially explosive track: “Hands off, jealous lover, please let me be” is a refrain that lodges immediately, delivered with fierce conviction over a rhythm track that builds to something close to frantic.
The album’s mid-section is where Foreign Tongues earns its depth. Mr. Charm is Mick at his most playful and self-aware — a swaggering self-introduction complete with a wry Elon Musk reference that lands with surprising wit. Divine Intervention is the record’s most politically charged moment, its imagery of billionaires scrambling skyward and a society in “divided dimension” driven home by Robert Smith of The Cure on guitar and Steve Winwood on piano and organ — an extraordinary confluence of talents that gives the track an almost cinematic intensity. Ringing Hollow brings the tempo down — a loping, country-inflected ballad that Jagger himself has described as being “about America as an idea.” It is simultaneously a love letter to the country that shaped the band’s musical imagination and a lament for what it has since become. “Lady Liberty don’t look so good when there’s a tear in her gown” is one of the album’s most quietly devastating lines. Never Wanna Lose You follows with warmth and vulnerability, anchored by a luminous electric piano, sweeping harmonies, and a cowbell contribution from Bruno Mars that gives the track an irresistible shimmer.
Then comes the one-two punch of Hit Me In The Head — a gloriously unhinged punk-rock sprint that opens with a count-in and never relents — and which carries an emotional weight the tracklisting doesn’t advertise: the drums feature a posthumous contribution from the late Charlie Watts, captured in one of his final recording sessions before his passing in 2021. You Know I’m No Good follows — an Amy Winehouse cover that the Stones make entirely their own. Mick reaches for his harmonica, the blues DNA surfaces, and the self-aware lyric “I told you I was trouble, you know that I’m no good” lands with the weight of a band that has never pretended to be anything other than what it is.
Credit: Universal Music Australia
Some Of Us is one of the album’s most quietly significant moments: a rare lead vocal outing for Keith Richards, and the first time Mick and Keith have shared the front of the stage on record in close to fifty years. It is a song about longing in its most unguarded form — Keith singing of someone just out of reach, Mick alongside him — and hearing those two voices together after half a century is a reminder of just how much history exists between them. Covered In You follows as the record’s most viscerally written track — obsessive, chaotic, and genuinely bold, with Paul McCartney on bass giving the track a melodic low-end that is unmistakably his. Side Effects is a candidate for the next single: punchy, hook-driven, and built for radio, its central ambiguity — is this about medication, addiction, or love? — giving it layers that reward repeated listening.
The album closes on a deeply considered note. Back In Your Life is the most expansive track on the record — a slow, stretching blues that runs over six minutes and gives Keith Richards room for one of his finest guitar solos on the album, with Ronnie Wood weaving alongside him throughout. “What would it take to get back in your life? I hate that I’m losing a friend” is sung with a restraint that makes it the most emotionally direct moment Mick Jagger has committed to record in years. And then Beautiful Delilah, a Chuck Berry cover, closes the album with a grin: rollicking, joyful, and entirely unapologetic. The Stones closing a 2026 studio album with Chuck Berry is not nostalgia — it’s a statement of identity. This is where we come from, and we’ve never left.
Foreign Tongues is not the record of a band coasting on legacy. It is the work of musicians who are genuinely engaged — with each other, with the world, and with the endlessly renewable craft of making rock and roll. In a music landscape that rarely rewards patience and craft in equal measure, it stands as one of the most complete albums The Rolling Stones have delivered in decades.
Foreign Tongues by The Rolling Stones is out now via Polydor/Universal Music.
★★★★½ | Review by Phillipe Blake, Chief Editor, The Urbanite
Band photo by Kevin Mazur
