"Foreign Tongues" is the 25th., studio album in the UK and the 27th., studio album in the US by the legendary English rock band The Rolling Stones, under Andrew Watt production, the album features musical contributions from Steve Jordan, Darryl Jones, Steve Winwood, Robert Smith, Paul McCartney, Benmont Tench, Bruno Mars, and Chad Smith, among others. It also features a song recorded with Charlie Watts prior to his death. So far, the album has released two singles "In The Stars" backed with "Rough And Twisted", and "Jealous Lover" backed with "Divine Intervention".
The album primarily consists of new material, with four compositions recorded during the band's last album, Hackney Diamonds including "Covered In You". The album includes material from band's final session with drummer Charlie Watts in 2021, as confirmed by Jagger at a press conference hosted by the band in New York City.
Foreign Tongues has just arriving just before Mick Jagger's 83rd birthday, and picks up where Hackney Diamonds left off. Again, Andrew Watt produces; again, the songs pull from every decade rock ‘n’ roll has existed in. The Stones, after all, have been there for most of them. It’s the sound of the best bar-room rock band there has ever been settling in and doing what they do. Rather well, as it happens.
Paul McCartney turns up on bass again. Robert Smith is in there somewhere, though you’ll be hard pushed to spot him. Steve Winwood, much more visible, plays organ across nine tracks. Bruno Mars, of all people, contributes an almost inaudible cowbell to ‘Never Wanna Lose You’. Charlie Watts appears from beyond the grey veil on ‘Hit Me in the Head’, preserved from a session before his death in 2021 — among the record’s most satisfying moments, for reasons we’ll get to. There are 14 tracks here, several passing five minutes, and almost everything could lose a minute or so. Extended choruses and outros abound, undercutting an album that is at its best when it is leanest.
The album opener "Rough and Twisted" is a proper vintage raw Stones. Foreign Tongues contains three genuinely great Stones songs, tracks that can stand shoulder to shoulder with the classic era, and this is the first. Everything you want from the band is on show with Jagger honks on his harp and sings about Muddy Waters. The guitars are great. They're great throughout, actually: Keith in one speaker, Ronnie in the other, crunching and jangling at each other. Everyone follows Keith. Richards and Wood are the engine of the record. When it works, it works because those two are locked in on each other and everyone else, including the producer, knows to stay out of the way, Next comes the astonishing and powerful "In The Stars" setting the awesome tune the record will have.
"Never Wanna Lose You", comes with its Some Girls funk shuffle and is perfectly serviceable with Bruno's cowbell alongside with long-time bassist Darryl Jones putting in a solid shift, although "Jealous Lover" does this better. "Side Effects" is the closest thing here to the 90s Stones — is the clear low point.
"Mr Charm" has a gospel-backed chorus that flirts with ‘Gimme Shelter’ — dangerous territory, that — but otherwise heads somewhere different: rollicking, funny and tossing off a couple of the sharpest Jagger lines on the record. "Divine Intervention" hides its Robert Smith cameo so effectively you’d never know he was there, but the song itself is a belter, a Some Girls-style boogie with a coda of soulful horns that opens it into something unexpectedly celebratory. "Ringing Hollow" is the second of those three classics, and possibly the best thing here. Country Stones. A letter to America that isn't angry. It's disappointed, which is a much harder mood to sell. The band pull it off. They' ve been in love with the place since they were teenagers and have explored more of it than most.
The third classic here is "Some of Us", in which Keith Richards takes the mic and leans into his years. One of the album’s great strengths is that Mick Jagger, at 82, doesn’t sound like an old man. Another is that Keith does. And that’s what makes him interesting. It leaves the song unusually exposed. You can almost see the tears leaving clean lines down his grubby, craggy face. The arrangement pulls closer to Let It Bleed’s country-gospel than to any of his solo records, and Jagger’s harmonies in the final section provide one of the few moments here that genuinely raises the hairs on the back of the neck.
Another comes in Ronnie Wood's solo on "Back in Your Life", a long, weeping performance of the kind he is rarely given room to unleash. Jagger introduces it with a delighted “Come on, Ronnie!” Wood has said the performance was bound up with hearing of the deaths of Sly Stone and Brian Wilson, and there’s something in the playing that knows it. The song itself sits at the ‘Wild Horses’ end of the ballad catalogue, and though it wouldn’t dream of comparing itself, Jagger’s sincerity steals it. It is not quite a fourth classic, but it may contain the album’s finest individual performance. He’s not phoning any of this in. The great late Charlie Watts returns on "Hit Me in the Head", a fast, sardonic garage-punk thing on which Jagger plausibly sings about wanting to be knocked unconscious to speed up his own demise. Watts might be beyond the grave, but he’s right on the groove, and the pocket he creates isn’t your imagination. It sounds satisfyingly like the Stones because it is the Stones. Steve Jordan does a fine job elsewhere. But when Watts is there, you really can feel it.
Now Jagger wanted a blunt, punk bass sound on "Covered in You", and so naturally phoned Paul McCartney, the most melodic bass player who has ever lived. You have to hand it to Macca, though: he knows how to serve the song. The bass grunts. Jagger sounds properly annoyed about something but the intensity of the outro over a great little Ronnie lick is fantastic. Meanwhile, a cover of Amy Winehouse’s "You Know I’m No Good" shouldn’t work. Jagger cannot reproduce the wounded self-indictment of Winehouse’s vocal, and Watt leans too hard on Mark Ronson’s polish where the track needed roughing up, but Winwood’s organ sounds great, Jagger’s harmonica is ace, and there’s more crossover between the Stones and Winehouse's rootsy soul than the pairing initially suggests.
Foreign Tongues closes, as Hackney Diamonds did, with a cover from the band's oldest heroes. That record signed off with Muddy Waters’ ‘Rolling Stone Blues’; this one goes with Chuck Berry’s "Beautiful Delilah", a song the Stones were playing on the radio in 1964. It’s intimate, acoustic-led and deliberately vintage, with slide guitars drenched in reverb. It does smack a bit of ‘look at us, we’re still keeping it real’, which is the one thing the Rolling Stones absolutely don’t need to do. They’ve earned being whoever they want to be. But it’s a hard heart that doesn’t enjoy it. If this turns out to be their last album, which seems unlikely but is theoretically possible, closing with Chuck Berry, whose ‘Come On’ became their debut single, creates a satisfying and presumably intentional full-circle moment.
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