The Rolling Stones' Foreign Tongues Arrives With 14 Tracks

What Happened

The Rolling Stones released Foreign Tongues on July 10 — their 25th studio album, 14 tracks, out through Polydor/Universal. It lands two and a half years after Hackney Diamonds, which by this band’s recent standards counts as a sprint. Before that record, you had to reach back to 2005 for a full album of new Stones songs. Two studio LPs inside three years, from a group that formed in 1962, is not the pace anyone had penciled in.

The album was cut at Metropolis Studios in West London, and cut quickly — the band, producer Andrew Watt, and a rotating cast of guests got the whole thing down in under a month. Jagger has described the sessions as intense and said he liked the room precisely because it was not too big: you could feel everyone in it. Ronnie Wood has said the band often nailed takes on the first pass. That is the pitch, and it is at least a coherent one. This is a record that wants to sound like people playing together in a room rather than files traded between laptops.

Twelve of the 14 songs are new compositions, including the pre-release tracks “Rough and Twisted,” “Jealous Lover,” and “In the Stars.” The remaining two are covers, and both are pointed choices: Amy Winehouse’s “You Know I’m No Good,” and Chuck Berry’s “Beautiful Delilah,” which closes the album and reaches back to one of the band’s founding influences. The guest list runs long — Paul McCartney, Steve Winwood, The Cure’s Robert Smith, Red Hot Chili Peppers drummer Chad Smith — alongside longtime collaborators Darryl Jones, Matt Clifford, and Steve Jordan.

Keith Richards has framed the sessions as continuation rather than reinvention: a month of concentrated work, in London, with the London air around them. Which is more or less what the record sounds like. You can read the full release rundown at Billboard, including the band’s own account of the sessions.

Why It Matters

The most consequential thing on Foreign Tongues is not a new song at all. Track eight, “Hit Me in the Head,” features Charlie Watts, captured during one of his final recording sessions before his death in August 2021. The Stones did the same on Hackney Diamonds, and it would be easy to read the move as sentimental housekeeping — a way of keeping the original engine in the frame while Steve Jordan does the actual driving.

But it is worth sitting with what that actually means. Watts drummed for the Stones for 58 years. Whatever tape exists of him is finite and shrinking, and every posthumous appearance draws from a well that will eventually run dry. The band has never pretended otherwise. Using the material while it lasts is not a gimmick so much as an acknowledgment that the clock is real, for the recordings and for the people who made them.

The Winehouse cover works on a similar frequency, though the Stones would probably resist the comparison. “You Know I’m No Good” is a 2006 song by an artist who died at 27, being sung by a man in his eighties who has spent six decades playing the unrepentant cad it describes. There is a genuine strangeness there — a generational hand-off running backwards.

Taken together, the two choices tell you what the album is really about. Foreign Tongues is a record about lineage: who the Stones learned from, who they lost, and who they are still willing to borrow from. The Chuck Berry closer is the front end of that line. Watts is the middle of it. Winehouse is the far end, and the fact that she came and went while the band kept going is the sort of thing an album this cheerful mostly declines to dwell on.

The Reaction

Critics have been warm without being swept away, and the split is instructive. Nobody expected another Exile on Main St., and the reviews that land best are the ones that stop pretending that was ever on the table.

Consequence handed it a B-minus and called it a “bloated, though often fun, mixed bag,” praising the front half — the crunch of “Rough and Twisted,” the deliberately silly falsetto on “Jealous Lover,” and the chorus of “Divine Intervention,” which is lifted considerably by Robert Smith’s guitar. The complaint arrives with the back half, where the tempo drops and, per that review, the songs stop justifying their own length. The lyrics take a beating too.

Other outlets have been kinder, framing the album as guitar-forward and more holistically Stones-y than Hackney Diamonds, which sometimes tilted toward a Jagger solo record. Both readings can be true. Where the two camps agree is the guest problem: several of the marquee names contribute so subtly that you would never identify them unaided. McCartney is on bass somewhere. Chad Smith is hitting something. Whether that is a flaw or simply the reality of a session band this deep is a matter of taste — the counterargument is that a Stones album where you can hear the cameos is a Stones album that has stopped being a Stones album.

What Comes Next

The obvious question is the tour, and the honest answer is that nobody has committed to one. Jagger, speaking on BBC Radio 2, said he would love to go back on the road and could not wait — then immediately tempered it, saying he did not think it would happen this year. That follows the band scrapping planned UK and European stadium dates, and Richards has since pointed vaguely toward 2027.

Charts, meanwhile, offer a cleaner storyline. The Stones have 38 top 10 albums on the Billboard 200 and nine No. 1s; a tenth would put them into double digits, a club with very few members. At home they have eight No. 1s on the Official UK Albums Chart, Hackney Diamonds included, and that record went on to win the Grammy for best rock album. A repeat is not guaranteed — the release calendar around it is crowded — but the ceiling is unusually high for a band six decades in.

Closing Thoughts

There is a version of this story where a legacy act putting out a fourteen-track album in its sixty-fourth year is a little sad. That version is not very interesting, and it is also not what happened here.

What actually happened is that four or five people who have nothing left to prove booked a room for a month, played loudly, and put out the results without agonizing over whether every track earned its place. Some of it rips. Some of it drags. The band appears untroubled by the distinction, and given the sixty-four years of evidence behind them, they may have earned the right not to care.

That is the tension Foreign Tongues never resolves, and probably should not. It is a victory lap. But it is a victory lap taken at speed, by people who still like the running.

한글 요약

롤링 스톤스가 7월 10일 통산 25번째 정규 앨범 ‘Foreign Tongues’를 발표했습니다. 14곡 구성으로, 그래미 록 앨범상을 받은 ‘Hackney Diamonds’ 이후 2년 반 만입니다. 런던 서부 메트로폴리스 스튜디오에서 프로듀서 앤드루 와트와 한 달이 채 안 되는 기간에 녹음을 마쳤고, 믹 재거는 “너무 크지 않은 방”에서 모두의 열기를 느낄 수 있었다고 밝혔습니다. 신곡 12곡에 에이미 와인하우스의 ‘You Know I’m No Good’, 척 베리의 ‘Beautiful Delilah’ 커버 2곡이 더해졌습니다.

가장 주목받는 대목은 8번 트랙 ‘Hit Me in the Head’입니다. 2021년 8월 세상을 떠난 드러머 찰리 와츠가 생전 마지막 녹음 세션에서 남긴 연주가 담겼습니다. 폴 매카트니, 스티브 윈우드, 더 큐어의 로버트 스미스, 레드 핫 칠리 페퍼스의 채드 스미스 등 게스트 라인업도 화려합니다. 평단 반응은 온화하지만 만장일치는 아닙니다. 초반부의 에너지와 로버트 스미스가 참여한 ‘Divine Intervention’의 후렴은 호평받았지만, 후반부가 늘어지고 게스트들의 기여가 잘 들리지 않는다는 지적도 나왔습니다.

투어는 아직 미정입니다. 재거는 BBC 라디오 2에서 다시 무대에 서고 싶다면서도 올해는 어렵다고 선을 그었고, 키스 리처즈는 2027년 가능성을 시사했습니다. 차트에서는 빌보드 200 통산 10번째 1위 여부가 관전 포인트입니다. 지금까지 톱10 앨범 38장, 1위 9장을 기록했습니다.

참고: Billboard · Consequence 리뷰 · Metacritic