I’ll leave it to others to provide Foreign Tongues with the traditional blessing that greets every new Rolling Stones album—“it’s their best since Some Girls!”—but I will say it features their best cover art since Some Girls. Created by Chicago painter Nathaniel Mary Quinn, the image mashes up caricatures of Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, and Ron Wood into a glorious grotesquerie that channels the colorful glam-trash aesthetics of the band’s late-’70s phase. In the process, it also takes every ageist insult that’s been lobbed at the Stones over the years—they’re too old, too wrinkly, too decrepit—and rubs it in our faces. Where they once shocked the tabloids with their wanton drug use and cross-dressing, the cover reminds us that the most provocative thing the Stones can do these days is simply continue to exist as octogenarians.
But as much as the art suggests a rebirth of the band’s campy streak, it also reflects a mix-and-match approach to familiar Stonesy archetypes. Following 2023’s Hackney Diamonds (their first album of originals in nearly two decades, and first since the 2021 death of drummer Charlie Watts), Foreign Tongues marks the band’s second collaboration with Andrew Watt, the 35-year-old producer who’s become the de facto hooksmaxxing guru for veteran rockers. As a producer with a foot in both the classic-rock and modern pop/rap worlds, Watt possesses both a fanboy’s reverence for Stones history and a shrewd knowledge of the precision mechanics practiced in pro songwriters’ rooms. The Stones may not be chasing the zeitgeist as flagrantly as they did in the late ’70s and ’80s, but, under Watt’s thumb, they do sound ever more attuned to the science of contemporary pop music, where the verses, pre-choruses, and choruses kick in at perfectly timed intervals—i.e., songwriting as a neatly arranged procession of clippable moments.
And so you have a lot of instances on Foreign Tongues where the band’s innate, let-it-loose swagger rubs up against this calculated craftiness to awkward effect. The “Parachute Woman”-goes-to-Vegas blues romp “Rough and Twisted” and the “Soul Survivor” riff-nicking strut “In the Stars” give way to smoothed-out choruses that a bit feel like a tuxedoed butler showing up to serve you a glass of Dom in the middle of a roadhouse brawl. The politically pointed yet disjointed “Covered in You” pits the bratty Jagger who breathlessly rapped his way through “Shattered” and “Dance (Pt. 1)” against the MOR Mick who made She’s the Boss. And then there’s the missed opportunity that is “Jealous Lover,” where Jagger’s falsetto tries to tickle your “Emotional Rescue” pleasure points, but the song forsakes deviant disco for a stately soul ballad that—like Beck circa “Debra”—blurs the line between sincere homage and comedy sketch.
Foreign Tongues was built around leftover material from the Hackney Diamonds sessions, and the two albums are such mirror images of one another that they may as well have been released together, Use Your Illusion-style. Each come outfitted with a snotty rocker about inflicting violence on the noggin (“Bite My Head Off” vs. “Hit Me in the Head”), a mid-album country breather (“Dreamy Skies” vs. “Ringing Hollow”), a comforting, Keith-sung comedown track (“Tell Me Straight” vs. “Some of Us”), a blown-out gospel-ballad climax (“Sweet Sounds of Heaven” vs. “Back in Your Life”), and an album-closing return to the band’s blues roots through a stripped-down cover designed to sound like it was recorded in the Beggars Banquet toilet stall (Muddy Waters’ “Rolling Stone Blues” vs. Chuck Berry’s “Beautiful Delilah”). The celeb-stacked guest lists also overlap, with Paul McCartney and Benmont Tench showing up for another go-round, though Hackney ringers Lady Gaga and Elton John were apparently traded for Bruno Mars and Robert Smith in a blockbuster off-season deal. And there’s another posthumous appearance from Charlie to bridge the Stones’ Watts and Watt eras.
But Foreign Tongues improves upon its predecessor by trading in Hackney’s mannered, mid-tempo execution for a more robust rhythmic flair that shines a brighter spotlight on bassist Darryl Jones and drummer Steve Jordan, who steer “Never Wanna Lose You” toward the Stones’ ’80s dance-rock canon. And while the enduring strength of Jagger’s voice has never been in doubt, he seems to be having more fun here and also using his position in the rock establishment to prod at power structures from within. The cheeky chant of “Mr Charm” provides a distant echo of the Goats Head Soup-era groupie sleazefest “Star Star,” only this time, it’s Jagger playing the proverbial starfucker leeching off his paramour’s riches while mocking the outer-space obsessions of the one percent, with “mad mogul Mr. Musk” catching strays.
Unlike so many latter-day Stones albums erroneously slapped with the “best since Some Girls” tag, Foreign Tongues invites legitimate comparisons to that record on purely musical grounds by giving equal airtime to the band’s punky and funky sensibilities. Where the apocalypse-themed “Divine Intervention” steers a respectably “Respectable”-like garage racket toward a surprisingly urgent and emotional finale, the reverentially restless rendition of Amy Winehouse’s “You Know I’m No Good” sounds like it was spun out from the harmonica-slathered groove of “Miss You.” It’s an extremely rare instance of the Stones deigning to cover a song outside the traditional blues canon, and an even rarer case of Jagger gender-flipping a track originally written by a woman. But he clearly relishes the opportunity to put his stamp on the song both as a singer and a player, replacing the Dap-Kings’ authoritative brass refrain with blasts of howling harmonica. (The song is also probably the closest he’ll get to the self-demonizing introspection of “Sympathy for the Devil” in 2026.)
If the title of Hackney Diamonds called back to the Stones’ London roots, Foreign Tongues feels more firmly planted in the USA, from the New York and Silverlake scenery of “Divine Intervention” to the Florida trailer-park fantasies of “Never Wanna Lose You.” The country, of course, has long been the Stones’ most fertile source of musical inspiration, but, as we hear on Foreign Tongues, it’s a long-term relationship that’s hit the rocks. “Ringing Hollow” is fashioned as an old-timey honky-tonk heartbreaker, though in this case, Mick and Keith—singing in torn’n’frayed unison—are breaking up with America, dismayed by its authoritarian tilt, failed promises, and “scoundrels trying to whip the crowd.” On top of authentically conjuring that early-’70s moment when the Stones were hanging out with Gram Parsons and inventing alt-country, the song also recalls a time when Jagger-Richards was among the most perceptive songwriting tandems in rock. At their most primal and powerful, the Stones weren’t simply selling American music back to Americans, they were holding a mirror up to the nation’s violent, decadent soul. Foreign Tongues’ cover revels in the Stones’ ugliness; the album shows they can still force us to reckon with our own.
