The Rolling Stones: Foreign Tongues — They're Not Done Yet. Not Even Close.

There's a version of this review that starts with a caveat — something about managing expectations for a band that formed in 1962 and has outlasted every reasonable prediction of their creative shelf life. That version is wrong. Foreign Tongues, The Rolling Stones' new studio album, demands no such hedging.

This is a genuinely great record.

“Foreign Tongues is the sound of a band that has stopped worrying about legacy and started focusing on the music again.”

— Phillipe Blake, The Big Curious

Recorded in under a month at Metropolis Studios in West London with producer Andrew Watt — who also helmed the Grammy-winning Hackney Diamonds — the album moves with an urgency that Mick Jagger himself put down to the deliberately compressed recording window. He's right to credit it. Foreign Tongues has no filler, no songs that feel like they're coasting, no moment where you sense the band is simply going through the motions. Fourteen tracks in, and not one of them outstays its welcome.

Where It Begins

The album opens with Rough and Twisted, a swampy blues that was teased ahead of release under the alias The Cockroaches — a move that gave the track a life of its own before anyone knew what it was. Heard in context, it's a perfect statement of intent: gritty, unhurried, rooted in the same earth that produced their earliest records. In The Stars pivots immediately to anthemic pop/rock — enormous chorus, timeless hook — and by the time Jealous Lover (the lead single) arrives with its explosive "Hands off, jealous lover, please let me be" refrain, it's clear this album is playing in a different register to anything the band has produced in recent memory.

The Middle Is Where It Gets Interesting

Mr. Charm is Mick at peak wit — a swaggering self-introduction that somehow includes an Elon Musk name-drop without losing the thread, delivered with such confidence it earns its place. Divine Intervention is the record's most politically charged track: dystopian imagery, jagged guitar, and a chorus that would be enormous live — elevated further by Robert Smith of The Cure on guitar and Steve Winwood on piano and organ. That combination of players on a single Stones track shouldn't work as well as it does, and yet it's one of the album's undeniable highlights.

Ringing Hollow is where the album takes its most interesting turn. A loping, country-tinged ballad, Mick has described it as being "about America as an idea" — a love letter to the country that ignited the band's musical obsessions, and a lament for what it has become. "Lady Liberty don't look so good when there's a tear in her gown." Keith calls it "our way of saying: we love you." Both things are true at once, which is what makes it work.

Never Wanna Lose You arrives with warmth, a gorgeous electric piano line, and — in one of the album's more delightful surprises — Bruno Mars on cowbell. It sounds gimmicky on paper. On record, it just makes the song better.

Then Hit Me In The Head. A gloriously unhinged punk sprint that opens with a count-in and never lets up — and carries an emotional weight the tracklisting doesn't advertise: the drums feature a posthumous contribution from Charlie Watts, recorded in one of his final sessions before his passing in 2021. It hits differently when you know that.

The Cover That Steals The Show

You Know I'm No Good — yes, the Amy Winehouse track — is the album's most talked-about moment, and it earns every bit of that attention. The Stones don't soften it or simply replicate it. Mick pulls out the harmonica, the blues comes up through the floor, and the result is something that sounds simultaneously like Amy Winehouse and absolutely nobody but the Rolling Stones.

"I told you I was trouble, you know that I'm no good."

In Mick's hands, that line doesn't sound like a borrowed confession. It sounds like autobiography.

The Moment Nobody Saw Coming

Some Of Us is the album's most quietly extraordinary track. It features Keith Richards on lead vocals — not a rarity in itself — but this time Mick is right there alongside him, sharing the front of the record for the first time in close to fifty years. It is a song about longing — the quiet, unglamorous kind. Keith sings of someone just out of reach, Mick beside him, and hearing those two voices intertwine after half a century does something no amount of critical framing can adequately prepare you for. Just listen.

The Close

Covered In You — with Paul McCartney on bass — is obsessive, chaotic, and genuinely bold. Side Effects is the next obvious single: punchy, hook-laden, and addictively ambiguous — medication, addiction, love, all three at once. Then Back In Your Life, the album's most expansive track at over six minutes: a slow, deep blues that gives Keith Richards room for one of his finest guitar solos here, Ronnie Wood weaving in and out alongside him. "I hate that I'm losing a friend" is sung with a restraint Mick Jagger hasn't always permitted himself, and it lands.

And then Beautiful Delilah, a Chuck Berry cover, closes everything with a grin. Rollicking, joyful, entirely unapologetic. The Stones ending a 2026 album with Chuck Berry isn't nostalgia. It's a statement of lineage — a band reminding you where they came from and making absolutely clear they've never left.

The Verdict

Foreign Tongues is one of the most complete albums The Rolling Stones have made in decades — fresh, honest, and genuinely fun. Mick Jagger's voice, far from showing its age, has settled into something more interesting: a lived-in authority that no amount of vocal training can manufacture.

Put it on. Turn it up.

Foreign Tongues by The Rolling Stones is out now via Polydor/Universal Music.

Band photo by Kevin Mazur