Foreign Tongues

Hackney Diamonds brought the Rolling Stones back in 2023: their first album of new songs since 2005, made with the producer Andrew Watt, and the winner of the Grammy for Best Rock Album in 2025. Foreign Tongues arrived less than three years later, on 10 July 2026, with the same producer and Steve Jordan again on drums, as their 25th studio album by the British count. The official story is short: under a month of sessions at Metropolis Studios in West London. “It was a month of concentrated punch,” Keith Richards said when it was announced.

The credits tell a longer one. The booklet lists five studios in Los Angeles, London and New York, and Mick Jagger has said ten of the tracks were recorded in London. Paul McCartney’s bass on “Covered in You” was cut at the same session as his part for “Bite My Head Off” on Hackney Diamonds, and Richards has called the two records “really a double album”. The London sessions were under way in June 2025: Ronnie Wood was in the studio when he heard that Brian Wilson had died, and played the long solo on “Back in Your Life” that day, in one take of about nine minutes that was later cut to around five.

The oldest recording here is the one that matters most to the band’s story. “Hit Me in the Head” carries Charlie Watts’s drums from a session at Henson Studios in Los Angeles in 2021, before he died that August, with additional production by Don Was, Richards on piano and Watt on bass. At 2:57 it is the shortest song on the album, and Jagger introduced it at the launch as “real fast, a punk-rocker”. Watts also drums on “Bad Luck Hideaway”, an iTunes bonus track that is also on the coming deluxe edition. Everywhere else the drummer is Jordan, who, Richards says, was first suggested to him by Watts himself.

Around the three Stones, the playing is spread wide. Jordan drums on twelve of the fourteen songs, and Darryl Jones, who missed Hackney Diamonds, plays bass on nine. Matt Clifford plays keyboards on five songs and co-wrote “Never Wanna Lose You” and “Covered in You”; Watt plays on twelve tracks and co-wrote “Side Effects” and “Back in Your Life”. Of the guests, only Steve Winwood plays throughout, on organ, piano or Rhodes in nine songs. Robert Smith appears on two, Bruno Mars plays cowbell on one, and Chad Smith plays bass drum on the closing Chuck Berry cover, “Beautiful Delilah”: “like 10 bars”, by Jagger’s count.

The words are where the record looks outward. The title comes from a line in the opener, “Rough and Twisted”, which first surfaced in April as a white-label 12-inch credited to the Cockroaches, a name the band had used in 1977. “Mr. Charm” is a gigolo who name-checks “mad mogul Mr. Musk”; “Divine Intervention” sends billionaires to “their bolt holes in the sky”; “Covered in You” is “sick and tired of all these autocrats”. Jagger has described “Ringing Hollow” as a love song to America built around the Statue of Liberty. Richards sings lead on “Some of Us”, and the band covers Amy Winehouse’s “You Know I’m No Good” in, as Jagger put it, “pretty much her arrangement”, with him playing the original’s horn line on harmonica.

Most reviews were warm. Metacritic averages 75 from 20 reviews, and the Times and the Telegraph gave it five stars. It went to No. 1 in the UK, the band’s 15th, level with the Beatles, and to No. 7 on the Billboard 200, where it also gave the Stones their first No. 1 on Top Album Sales. The argument was about Watt. Rolling Stone, which liked the album, still found it “a little overly slick at times”; Pitchfork, at 6.1, thought his pop instincts sat badly with a band at its best when loose; Paste gave it a D+ and saved its praise for the Watts track. The songs critics praised most often were “Ringing Hollow”, “Some of Us” and Wood’s solo.

Foreign Tongues is two things packaged as one: a fast month in London and the best of what was left from the years around it. That shows in the length, just over an hour across fourteen songs, two of them covers, and in a guest list that is bigger in the press release than in the credits. What holds it together is what was caught quickly, from Wood’s one-take solo to Watts’s last session, and lyrics with more bite than a band whose founders are in their eighties needed to write. The five songs of Foreign Tongues, Loose Lips, due on 27 November, will make it longer still.