{"id":688736,"date":"2026-07-13T05:30:09","date_gmt":"2026-07-13T05:30:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/688736\/"},"modified":"2026-07-13T05:30:09","modified_gmt":"2026-07-13T05:30:09","slug":"the-rolling-stones-foreign-tongues-album-review-3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/688736\/","title":{"rendered":"The Rolling Stones: Foreign Tongues Album Review"},"content":{"rendered":"

I\u2019ll leave it to others to provide Foreign Tongues with the traditional blessing that greets every new Rolling Stones<\/a> album\u2014\u201cit\u2019s their best since Some Girls<\/a>!\u201d\u2014but I will say it features their best cover art since Some Girls. Created by Chicago painter Nathaniel Mary Quinn, the image mashes up caricatures of Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, and Ron Wood into a glorious grotesquerie that channels the colorful glam-trash aesthetics of the band\u2019s late-\u201970s phase. In the process, it also takes every ageist insult that\u2019s been lobbed at the Stones over the years\u2014they\u2019re too old, too wrinkly, too decrepit\u2014and rubs it in our faces. Where they once shocked the tabloids with their wanton drug use and cross-dressing<\/a>, the cover reminds us that the most provocative thing the Stones can do these days is simply continue to exist as octogenarians.<\/p>\n

But as much as the art suggests a rebirth of the band\u2019s campy streak, it also reflects a mix-and-match approach to familiar Stonesy archetypes. Following 2023\u2019s Hackney Diamonds<\/a> (their first album of originals in nearly two decades, and first since the 2021 death of drummer Charlie Watts<\/a>), Foreign Tongues marks the band\u2019s second collaboration with Andrew Watt, the 35-year-old producer who\u2019s become the de facto hooksmaxxing guru for veteran rockers. As a producer with a foot in both the classic-rock and modern pop\/rap worlds, Watt possesses both a fanboy\u2019s reverence for Stones history and a shrewd knowledge of the precision mechanics practiced in pro songwriters\u2019 rooms. The Stones may not be chasing the zeitgeist as flagrantly as they did in the late \u201970s and \u201980s, but, under Watt\u2019s thumb, they do sound ever more attuned to the science of contemporary pop music, where the verses, pre-choruses, and choruses kick in at perfectly timed intervals\u2014i.e., songwriting as a neatly arranged procession of clippable moments.<\/p>\n

No score yet, be the first to add.<\/p>\n

And so you have a lot of instances on Foreign Tongues where the band\u2019s innate, let-it-loose swagger rubs up against this calculated craftiness to awkward effect. The \u201cParachute Woman<\/a>\u201d-goes-to-Vegas blues romp \u201cRough and Twisted\u201d and the \u201cSoul Survivor<\/a>\u201d riff-nicking strut \u201cIn the Stars\u201d give way to smoothed-out choruses that a bit feel like a tuxedoed butler showing up to serve you a glass of Dom in the middle of a roadhouse brawl. The politically pointed yet disjointed \u201cCovered in You\u201d pits the bratty Jagger who breathlessly rapped his way through \u201cShattered<\/a>\u201d and \u201cDance (Pt. 1)<\/a>\u201d against the MOR Mick who made She\u2019s the Boss<\/a>. And then there\u2019s the missed opportunity that is \u201cJealous Lover,\u201d where Jagger\u2019s falsetto tries to tickle your \u201cEmotional Rescue<\/a>\u201d pleasure points, but the song forsakes deviant disco for a stately soul ballad that\u2014like Beck<\/a> circa \u201cDebra<\/a>\u201d\u2014blurs the line between sincere homage and comedy sketch.<\/p>\n

Foreign Tongues was built around leftover material from the Hackney Diamonds sessions, and the two albums are such mirror images of one another that they may as well have been released together, Use Your Illusion<\/a>-style. Each come outfitted with a snotty rocker about inflicting violence on the noggin (\u201cBite My Head Off\u201d vs. \u201cHit Me in the Head\u201d), a mid-album country breather (\u201cDreamy Skies\u201d vs. \u201cRinging Hollow\u201d), a comforting, Keith-sung comedown track (\u201cTell Me Straight\u201d vs. \u201cSome of Us\u201d), a blown-out gospel-ballad climax (\u201cSweet Sounds of Heaven\u201d vs. \u201cBack in Your Life\u201d), and an album-closing return to the band\u2019s blues roots through a stripped-down cover designed to sound like it was recorded in the Beggars Banquet toilet stall<\/a> (Muddy Waters\u2019 \u201cRolling Stone Blues\u201d vs. Chuck Berry<\/a>\u2019s \u201cBeautiful Delilah\u201d). The celeb-stacked guest lists also overlap, with Paul McCartney<\/a> and Benmont Tench showing up for another go-round, though Hackney ringers Lady Gaga<\/a> and Elton John<\/a> were apparently traded for Bruno Mars<\/a> and Robert Smith<\/a> in a blockbuster off-season deal. And there\u2019s another posthumous appearance from Charlie to bridge the Stones\u2019 Watts and Watt eras.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"I\u2019ll leave it to others to provide Foreign Tongues with the traditional blessing that greets every new Rolling…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":688737,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[375,96,128,56,54,55,307],"class_list":["post-688736","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-music","tag-albums","tag-entertainment","tag-music","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom","tag-web"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/688736","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=688736"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/688736\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/688737"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=688736"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=688736"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=688736"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}