Critics agree on what the Rolling Stones' 'Foreign Tongues' sounds like and split on whether that is a good thing

Two days after Foreign Tongues landed, the reviews are in and they do not disagree about what is on the record. They disagree about whether Andrew Watt should have left it alone.

The Rolling Stones' 25th studio album came out July 10 on Polydor and Capitol: 14 tracks, 62 minutes, twelve originals plus a cover of Amy Winehouse's "You Know I'm No Good" and a closing run at Chuck Berry's "Beautiful Delilah." Watt produced, as he did on 2023's Hackney Diamonds. Paul McCartney plays bass on "Covered in You." Robert Smith of the Cure turns up on synths. Steve Winwood is on piano and organ, Chad Smith bangs a concert bass drum on the Berry cover, and Bruno Mars is somewhere in there on cowbell. Charlie Watts, who died in 2021, drums on "Hit Me in the Head," recorded in a Los Angeles session shortly before his death.

Everybody covering the record agrees on that list. Where it splits is on the sound Watt built around it.

The same songs, heard two ways

Kory Grow's review in Rolling Stone calls Foreign Tongues a continuation of the band's late-career streak and says it is "more guitar-centric and holistically Stones-y" than Hackney Diamonds, which he thought leaned too hard on Jagger's vocal melodies. He credits Watt with keeping the band pointed at its own quintessence: "warm, bluesy riffs paired with Jagger's scabrous irony." He even allows that the album "sounds a little overly slick at times" and then decides that does not matter much.

Grant Sharples, writing in Paste, listened to the same slickness and gave the album a D+. His line on Watt: "Watt's pristine polish sands down the edges and defangs the Stones' guitar solos, and the shambolic rowdiness that defines the band's best work is almost entirely absent." He hears Steve Jordan's drums on "Never Wanna Lose You" as "sterile and lifeless." He calls the record "a monotonous slog."

Track by track, the two men are describing the same performances.

Read the right-hand column as a hostile translation of the left and you have the argument. Nobody is claiming the band cannot play. The question is whether the record sounds like three men in their eighties in a room, or like a very good producer's memory of what that used to sound like.

Watt is the variable

This is the fourth or fifth time the same fight has broken out around Andrew Watt, who has now done late-period records for Ozzy Osbourne, Iggy Pop, Pearl Jam and the Stones twice. He is a fan first and an engineer second, and his method is to get the band to sound like the version of itself the fans keep in their heads. That method produces records that are clean, loud, sequenced for stadiums, and safe. Watt has said the goal here was songs that translate to the stadium stage, and "In the Stars" and "Never Wanna Lose You" are exactly that.

The cost shows up on a track like "Rough and Twisted," which opened as a mystery release in April under the Stones' old Cockroaches pseudonym, 1,000 vinyl copies to a handful of shops. That is a joke about being a bar band. The recording is not a bar band. Whether the gap bothers you is basically the whole review.

The one moment both camps hand over without qualification is Charlie Watts. His playing on "Hit Me in the Head" is 2021 tape, five years old, and it is the thing that neither the polish nor the guest list can reproduce.

What Jagger is actually singing about

The other thing worth flagging: at 82, Jagger has written the most topical Stones lyrics in decades, and they are aimed squarely at America. "Ringing Hollow," a country rocker in the Gram Parsons vein, is the kiss-off. "Well, I was madly in love with you / Before we ever met," Jagger sings. "I saw all your movies / I smoked your cigarettes." Then: "Lady Liberty is wearing a frown."

On "Divine Intervention," the album's best song by Grow's reckoning and the one with Ronnie Wood's sharpest solo, he watches "billionaires all scuttling, scrambling to their bolt holes in the sky." On "Mr. Charm," an otherwise silly gigolo number, he refers to the world's first trillionaire as "mad mogul Mr. Musk." The album is called Foreign Tongues and the band is, in fact, singing about being foreign to the country that bought them.

Where I land

The split is not a mystery, it is a preference about production, and both reviewers gave you enough detail to figure out which side you are on before you press play. If you want the Stones to sound like they might fall apart, Watt will annoy you for 62 minutes. If you want to hear Keith Richards sing "Some of Us," a devotion song he has been carrying since the Eighties, and Charlie Watts play one last time, the polish is a toll worth paying. Sixty-two minutes is still too long. Cut the Winehouse cover and it is a better record.

Keith Richards has said the band may not tour again. Jagger has said he hopes they do, and that he wants to make more records. Reports around the album say they have another ten songs written.