The Rolling Stones' 'Foreign Tongues' arrives Friday, their first album since Hackney Diamonds

The Rolling Stones drop their 25th studio album, Foreign Tongues, on Friday, July 10. It is their first full record since 2023's Hackney Diamonds, and the second the band has made without Charlie Watts behind the kit.

Andrew Watt produces again, the young hitmaker who pulled a lean, present-tense sound out of Hackney Diamonds and clearly earned a second call. The guest list reads like a bar Jagger built himself: Paul McCartney turns up, so does Steve Winwood, and Robert Smith of the Cure and Chad Smith of the Red Hot Chili Peppers both make appearances. The record also carries a track from the band's final 2021 session with Charlie Watts in Los Angeles, the same run of sessions that fed Hackney Diamonds. Watts died that August. Steve Jordan has held the drum stool since, and does again here.

The rollout was a stunt, and a good one

The Stones did not just announce this album. They smuggled it in. Back on April 11 a twelve-inch called "Rough and Twisted" showed up in a handful of record shops, 1,000 copies, credited to The Cockroaches, the fake name the band used for secret club gigs in the 1970s. Anyone who clocked it got the joke a few weeks early. On May 5 the band made it official, put "Rough and Twisted" out digitally as a double A-side with the actual lead single "In the Stars," and set the July 10 date. "Jealous Lover" followed on June 26, the soul-leaning cut of the three.

"In the Stars" is the one that tells you where the record lives. Will Hodgkinson at The Times heard "a killer riff, a rambunctious harmonica solo from Mick Jagger," and he is right about the harmonica, which is the moment the song stops being competent and starts being a Rolling Stones song. It is blues rock played by men who have nothing left to prove and keep showing up anyway.

What's on it

Fourteen tracks, and the tracklist gives away the band's mood. Alongside the singles and originals like "Divine Intervention" and "Never Wanna Lose You," they cover Amy Winehouse's "You Know I'm No Good" and Chuck Berry's "Beautiful Delilah." The Berry pick is the Stones going home. Chuck Berry is the reason this band exists, the first language they ever spoke, and closing the loop on album 25 is either sentimental or earned depending on how the take lands. The Winehouse cover is the riskier bet. Her phrasing is so specific that a straight reading falls flat, so the interesting question is whether Jagger reworks it or just wears it.

For the cover, the band commissioned painter Nathaniel Mary Quinn, whose "Trinity" merges Jagger, Keith Richards, and Ronnie Wood into a single fractured face. It has already made a few worst-covers-of-the-year lists. It is at least a real swing, which is more than most legacy acts bother with.

Not the last one

Ronnie Wood tipped this back in September, telling The Sun, "Yes, you will be getting a new album next year. It is done." The obvious reading was that a band this old was clearing the vault one final time. Reports since say the opposite: the Stones have written at least ten more songs for a record after this one. Sixty-plus years in, they are not signing off. They are booking the next session.