Foreign Tongues

Album number twenty five, recorded in under a month at Metropolis Studios, and the Rolling Stones are still here, still writing, still confronting the world around them and, in the words of one reviewer, their remaining time within it. That last part is not a joke. Foreign Tongues is a record made by men who can count their tours on one hand, and the most striking thing about it is how little it flinches from that. It is modern-sounding, occasionally political, and it earned a respectable 7.2 from the critics who have heard it. For a band four decades past their supposed sell-by date, that is not a participation trophy. The guest list, on the other hand, reads like a life raft. Paul McCartney, Steve Winwood, Robert Smith and Chad Smith all turn up, which is either a generous celebration of a lifetime of friendships or a quiet acknowledgment that a lot of hands make a Stones album in 2026. When your featured artists are that famous, the line between collaboration and reinforcement gets blurry, and Sally is never quite sure whether she is hearing the Rolling Stones or the Rolling Stones and Friends. The one moment that silences the cynic is Hit Me in the Head, built around a part Charlie Watts recorded before his death. There is no marketing angle cheap enough to ruin that. A drummer playing on a record released years after he is gone is the kind of genuinely moving detail that reminds you why this band still matters, and why they keep going. The rest of the album is the Stones being reliably, professionally, defiantly the Stones. You knew that going in.