Mick Jagger, Ronnie Wood, Keith Richards, and Charlie Watts salute London after a Rolling Stones concert on May 22, 2018. The group bow evokes the stage as the matrix of their longevity. Credit: Raph_PH / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0
Released on Friday, July 10, 2026, the new Rolling Stones album arrives less than three years after Hackney Diamonds. With Foreign Tongues, Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, and Ronnie Wood extend a highly recognizable blues-rock formula. Producer Andrew Watt and several prestigious guests frame it. One simple question remains: what does a legend still produce when it refuses to become just a monument?
An Album Released As A Catalog Event
The official French Rolling Stones store presents Foreign Tongues as the band’s 25th studio album. The record has fourteen tracks. It was recorded in less than a month at Metropolis Studios in west London, with Andrew Watt working around the trio.
The official store does more than just provide a product sheet. It also sets out the album’s key markers: a CD box set, fourteen songs, and a fast London recording session. In The Stars launches the campaign. The lineup expands around Darryl Jones, Matt Clifford, Steve Jordan, Paul McCartney, and Robert Smith. Chad Smith, Steve Winwood, and Charlie Watts are also mentioned, the latter from an earlier session.
That continuity explains part of the impression left by the album. Foreign Tongues does not try to break with the Stones brand. It reorganizes it track by track, with a denser sound and drums pushed very far forward. The mix gives the band’s old vocabulary a contemporary surface.
A Fully Embraced Blues-Rock Formula
In its article published the morning of release, Franceinfo sums up the album’s immediate effect. It hears blues, rock ’n’ roll, a very restrained Mick Jagger vocal, and familiar formulas that still work. The judgment is favorable, but it also points to what is up for debate: the Rolling Stones are moving forward by returning to their own grammar.
On first listen, the opener, Rough And Twisted, plays the role of a manifesto. The riff, the harmonica, and the band interplay immediately establish familiar ground. In The Stars, already used as a single, pushes the same logic into a broader shape. Then the album shifts into neighboring registers. Jealous Lover leans toward dance, while Ringing Hollow heads toward a darker American-style ballad. Some Of Us moves into the rough melancholy carried by Keith Richards.
France Inter devoted a full listen to the album on its release day. However, the brief did not make it possible to establish the complete order of the fourteen tracks with certainty. It is therefore better to stick to the songs explicitly identified by the sources consulted. The list includes Rough And Twisted, In The Stars, Jealous Lover, and Ringing Hollow. It also includes Some Of Us, Covered In You, and Back In Your Life. The Amy Winehouse cover You Know I’m No Good is also identified.
The Guests, Between Legacy And Display
The cast reinforces the album’s heritage reading. Paul McCartney, Steve Winwood, Robert Smith, and Chad Smith appear in official and radio sources. Their presence is not merely decorative. It places Foreign Tongues in a history of lineages: 1960s contemporaries, heirs to British rock, alternative pop, and studio power.
But it can also have the opposite effect. The more names the album stacks up, the more it forces the question of what belongs to the song and what belongs to the event. Charlie Watts is a special case. The drummer, who died in 2021, appears from an earlier session, according to the official store and France Inter. That contribution is not just a promotional hook. It reminds us that the Stones’ current resurgence is written around a central absence.
Andrew Watt then becomes the album’s quiet but decisive figure. His role is less about modernizing the Stones from the outside than about tightening their energy. He organizes the takes and holds together the old bar-band sound with the demands of a 2026 production. The result may charm with its precision. It may also irritate when that precision smooths away the disorder that was part of the appeal.
A Reception Far From Consensus
The first French reactions already show two readings. Franceinfo stresses the pleasure of an album that reuses old formulas without exhausting them. Libération, in its July 10 music roundup, takes a much harsher tone. The paper sees a highly manufactured product marked by the desire for sonic and visual rejuvenation.
That contrast is useful, because it keeps the release from becoming an automatic celebration. The album seems effective when it owns its limits. The Stones are not pretending to reinvent rock, but to test what their language can still carry. It becomes more fragile when the contemporary packaging tries too hard to prove that the band still belongs to the present.
So the question of a Foreign Tongues review is neither nostalgia nor rejection. The album exists in a middle ground: faithful enough to reassure, produced enough to signal its era, surrounded enough to feel like an event. That is where its cultural interest lies. In 2026, the Rolling Stones are not just selling a new record. They are testing the durability of a signature. Rock longevity here is measured by a solid formula, but also by the clarity with which it accepts its limits.
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