“Guys, don’t grow old gracefully… it wouldn’t suit you,” The Who’s Pete Townshend told the Rolling Stones at their induction to the Rock n Roll Hall of Fame in 1989. They listened.
Fast-forward some four decades to 2026, and the surviving Stones have eschewed any state of grace for a raucous, almost confrontational new album in Foreign Tongues that bubbles over with energy and purpose. It picks up where their studio comeback Hackney Diamonds left off and turns it all up a few notches.
However, a word of warning: if the “loudness wars” of modern-day production get you down, you’ll need to brace. It’s a LOUD album; Jagger’s vocals are upfront, but then so are Steve Jordan’s drums, and Keith and Ronnie’s guitars, Darryl Jones’s bass and even those oddly synthetic-sounding backing vocals on the album’s big choruses.
Recorded over four intense weeks of work and play in a little studio in Chiswick – on the periphery of their old London stamping grounds – and folding four songs from the Hackney Diamonds sessions into the 14-song set, Foreign Tongues leaps out of the speakers from the off, sticking out its Kali tongue and raging against any dying of the light. The joy in their collective defiance is infectious. Watching the grainy studio footage as they bend into “Rough and Twisted” is like watching flares being launched into the dark, that pent-up, stuttering opening riff firing up the twin engines of anticipation and release for an absolute blast of an album lift-off, drenched in an explosion of drums and Ronnie Wood’s wonderful slide work.
Here and across this 62-minute set, Keith Richards is the old master of time, and timing, still in control of those levers of tension and release. Jagger’s vocals are strong, too, the lyrics funny, evocative and full of striking, often disconcerting images and asides. And with a range of guests popping in to lay one down – Steve Winwood, Robert Smith and Paul McCartney among them – and Ben Waters’ muscular boogie woogie piano stoking the fires on opening track “Rough and Twisted”, the group energy barely flags through to the overloaded, distorted acoustic sound field of the closing number, Chuck Berry’s “Beautiful Delilah”.
Watching the grainy studio footage as they bend into 'Rough and Twisted' is like watching flares being launched into the dark
First single, “In the Stars”, follows on from “Rough and Twisted”, and starts with a “whoooo” chorus that quotes the immortal “Gimme Shelter” before yielding to the main riff, which is a memory bank of several Stones songs – “Soul Survivor” and “It Must Be Hell” among them – yet Keith twists that riff at the neck to make it leaner, meaner, fresh and wild, with Jagger crafting another set of visceral, scattershot lyrics that take in fate, fortune, dreams and desire, and the unspeakable pleasures of abandonment.
Third single “Jealous Lover” is closer to the funk-rock of “Tops” from Tattoo You, with lovely interplay between Steve Winwood and the guitarists. Mick’s trying on a 1970s falsetto for size, and while it’s overwrought it’s not as painful as the Black & Blue outtake, “Shame, Shame, Shame”. It’s a witty, knowing lyric, too, charting the green-eyed monster’s rise and reign as the object of his desire shapeshifts from bedmate to a praying mantis feeding on its prey. The course of love is not always smooth in a Stones song.
“Mr Charm” opens with a riff that sounds like it was pulled out of one of Keith’s 1980s solo albums, before gearing up to a drum-heavy groove over which Jagger reels off verse after verse. It’s an entertaining character song, and wordy – Foreign Tongues is a wordy album – and on first listen it’s a bit slick – the chorus especially – but it’s a grower, and towards the end it shifts gears and starts to rise up the spine the way the best Stones songs do, all those layers of time, rhythm and groove coalescing into take-off.
The apocalyptic stresses of the present drag their pelts through the high energy of “Divine Intervention”, Keith and Ronnie’s twin guitars meshing with that Some Girls-era clang, and there’s a big uplifting pop chorus to take it higher (possibly involving The Cure’s Robert Smith). They’re great, scattershot lyrics, too – associational rather than lyrical, throwing out vivid images and scenes that viscerally evoke, rather than comment upon, the curse of interesting times that rules our 2020s.
A classic Stones country swagger propels “Ringing Hollow”, Jagger’s vocals more on the back step here, the lyrics deftly and wittily filleting the band’s love affair with America and its culture and where all that has gone and what it has come to. “It’s ringing hollow, it’s ringing deep, it’s ringing loud ...” Again, it evokes more than comments. It’s got harmony vocals from Keith, too, and a nice play out with Winwood’s keys sliding in nicely beside the chiming guitars.
On ‘Some of Us’ Keith Richards’ balladeer’s voice is beautifully captured by producer Andrew Watts
Bassist Darryl Jones gets some time in the spotlight in the funky disco beat of “Never Wanna Lose You”, its big poppy chorus tilted atop like an overly flamboyant hat, but it collects itself and struts and peacocks nicely into the fade-out, while Charlie Watts is behind the drums again on the punky, glam-punk stomp of “Hit Me in the Head”, a sort-of son of Hackney Diamond’s “Bite My Head Off” but with a bigger, even shoutier chorus for the band to chew on. There’s echo-drenched harmonica, the twin guitars are lean, mean and minimal, Jagger is at his dark-humoured best and, poignantly, it’s drawn from one of Charlie’s last recording sessions.
The first of the album’s two covers, Amy Winehouse’s “You Know I’m No Good” promises to be a natural fit, but it could do with more space and languor, and Jagger’s vocal is overly emphatic. In contrast, Keith Richards’ one lead vocal on “Some of Us” is the opposite, his balladeer’s voice beautifully captured by producer Andrew Watts. It’s drawn from a Dirty Work session tape, whose space and leanness is in sharp contrast to the sometimes over-full canvas of sound Watts creates for the band. It’s a powerful, deep-cut ballad that stands out the way “Tell Me Straight” does on Hackney Diamonds. That Mick adds a lovely harmony vocal is a sweet touch too. As on “Rings Hollow”, the twins still glimmer.
Paul McCartney, who released his reflective Boys of Dungeon Lane last month, steps up to play bass on “Covered in You”, a rock-rap song packed with lyrics and lyrical asides, rapped and stacked up high à la “Shattered”, with wonderfully jagged Keith and Ronnie interplay. Jagger’s harmonica is thrillingly good, and while at first the big poppy chorus didn’t work for me, it’s stuck in my head and won’t leave.
“Side Effects” follows, a witty, sprightly and especially apposite song that Jagger and Richards worked on together at the sessions. It lightly carries the weight of this particular band’s previous form when it comes to delicious and forbidden activities and their colourful trail of side effects. It’s instantly likeable, and with another earworm of a chorus.
There’s an elixir in the band’s dynamic that releases itself when all the good things are in place
Big Stones ballad don’t come much bigger than “Back in Your Life”; being one of the songs on Foreign Tongues that’s got the space to breath and relax a bit helps it expand to its proper volume. Listen to Ronnie gently ease into his beautiful solo before the final verse-chorus that precedes the album’s ultimate guitar blowout – recorded, we’re told, the day after Ronnie had learnt of the deaths of Sly Stone and Brian Wilson – and in one take, the energy and emotion spilling out of him, brass section honking behind, Jagger wailing and extemporalising, and the band building up before easing it down for a long Stones fade. It’ll give you the vapours. Like “Sweet Sounds” from Hackney Diamonds, it comes from the same fold as the best Stones ballads; Jagger’s voice even cracks a little here and there – displaying the kind of wear and tear that other elder singers are more than happy to show.
But Jagger and the Stones aren’t like those old dudes. There’s no looking back, no confessions, no regrets, no accepting of the weights and measures of time or age. None of that matters; what matters is what’s happening now, in the space where these elder gentlemen of the road come together and transmogrify, like the unruly gods of Metamorphosis, into the Rolling Stones. Performing live together in a room, often capturing a song in first or second takes – Ronnie calls it “pulling magic from the air” – you realise there’s an elixir in the band’s dynamic that releases itself when all the good things are in place, and it’s that elixir that makes Foreign Tongues such a playful, lively, bracing, energising listen – even with Andrew Watts’ post-production boosting. It’s funk, it’s punk, it’s country, disco, rap. And it’s totally rock n roll. It’s kind of a miracle.
And just as Hackney Diamonds was sealed with the hot wax of “Rolling Stone Blues”, so this album gets its tongue into the hide of Chuck Berry’s “Beautiful Delilah” as a closer, played hard, acoustic and distorted, and played for real, and for fun, the old dudes in the room captured in ways that retain the spirits of release and play – ways and spirits we still don’t fully understand, but we know when they’re there. Bravo, boys.
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