Rolling Stones Album Review
By David Cohen | Classic Rock
I’ve spent enough hours playing rhythm guitar in a covers band to know that some chemistry can’t be taught. You either have it with the people you’re playing with, or you don’t. So when a band is on its 25th studio album, with two of its three core members in their eighties, and it still sounds like it’s arguing and laughing in the same breath — that’s not longevity. That’s something rarer.
Foreign Tongues, released on 10 July 2026, is the Rolling Stones’ follow-up to Hackney Diamonds, the 2023 comeback that picked up a Grammy and went multi-platinum after the band’s longest studio silence in decades. Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood went back to work with producer Andrew Watt, largely at Metropolis Studios in London, and by most accounts moved fast. Jagger has talked about the band adopting what he called a “bulldozer approach” to writing — getting ideas down before anyone in the room had the chance to talk themselves out of a song. You can hear that instinct all over the record. Nothing here sounds overworked.
Fourteen Songs, No Filler
What struck me most, working through this front to back, is how genuinely varied it is without losing the thread of who’s playing it. The 14 tracks cover a lot of ground: the snarling rockers (“Rough & Twisted,” “Hit Me in the Head”), grooves with a disco-era pulse (“Jealous Lover,” “Never Wanna Lose You”), a country-honk detour (“Ringing Hollow”), and ballads that let Richards take the mic on his own terms (“Some of Us”). “In the Stars,” the lead single, is the closest thing to a pure pop moment on the record, and it works precisely because the band doesn’t oversell it.
Then there are the covers and cameos, which is where the record gets genuinely interesting for anyone who follows this band’s history of folding tribute into new work. “You Know I’m No Good” — the Amy Winehouse song — is a bold choice, and the band treats it with the same reverence Jagger and Richards have always shown for singers who understood the blues in their bones. “Covered in You” brings in Paul McCartney on bass, which is the kind of détente between two camps of British rock royalty that would have seemed unthinkable a generation ago. The album closes on a cover of Chuck Berry’s “Beautiful Delilah,” with Chad Smith of the Red Hot Chili Peppers sitting in — a fitting bookend, since a Berry cover was the Stones’ very first single back in 1963.
What a Working Musician Hears
I wrote recently about the John Fogerty case — the lawsuit where he was accused, in effect, of sounding too much like himself. Listening to Foreign Tongues, I kept coming back to that same idea. A band’s sound is a fingerprint, not a formula, and after six decades together, Richards and Wood still lock into a rhythm-guitar conversation that nobody else can replicate, no matter how many young pretenders study their records. That interplay — the give and take between the two guitars, neither one quite playing lead, neither quite playing rhythm — is the actual engine of this band, and it’s fully intact here.
Watt deserves credit too. He produced Hackney Diamonds, and his fingerprints on this record are less about pushing the Stones somewhere new and more about staying out of the way of a band that, evidently, still knows exactly what a Stones record is supposed to sound like.
Confirmation, Straight From the Studio
Since I first wrote about this record, Jagger and Watt sat down together for Variety at Metropolis Studios to walk through the making of “Mr. Charm” track by track — reportedly the first time Jagger has ever done a proper song-by-song breakdown like this for one of the band’s own tracks. It’s worth a watch for anyone who wants to see how these songs actually get built.
The account of the writing process is a small case study in why this band still works. Jagger came up with the original riff and had keyboardist Matt Clifford lay a beat over it, then sent the demo to Richards. Richards sent it back transformed — a different riff entirely, plus a new bassline that hadn’t existed before, reshaping the song into something else. Jagger’s original riff is still buried in there, just no longer the hook you notice first. As Jagger tells it, Richards simply made it better, and that’s the job.
What struck me most, though, was Watt’s own description of the guitar interplay on this particular track — the two of them “weaving together and listening to each other and responding to each other.” That’s about as clean a confirmation as you’ll get, from the man who produced the record, of exactly the chemistry I was describing above. There’s also a nice, humanising detail in there: Jagger apparently still grabs Richards’ or Wood’s guitar mid-session to demonstrate an idea, a habit his bandmates reportedly tolerate rather than love.
One more note for the record: Foreign Tongues gave the Stones their 15th UK Number One album, tying them with the Beatles for the second-most chart-toppers in UK history — with only Robbie Williams, who reached his 16th this year, ahead of them. Whatever else this album is, it isn’t a band coasting on reputation.
Is This the Last One?
Both Jagger and Richards have been asked, inevitably, whether this is the final Rolling Stones album, and neither seems to have a firm answer — which feels honest rather than coy. Wood turns 80 next year. There’s no guarantee of another record after this one. But if Foreign Tongues does turn out to be the last word, it’s a genuinely strong way to close the book: a record with real range, a band still enjoying the argument, and none of the diminishing returns you brace yourself for from a legacy act this far into its run.
I don’t say that lightly, and I don’t think it’s nostalgia talking. This is a good record on its own terms, not just an impressive one for a band in its eighties.
David Cohen is an English solicitor and Israeli lawyer practising in cross-border technology transactions. He is also a gigging musician with his band The Core.
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