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Put on your hi-heel sneakers. The best way to appreciate Foreign Tongues, the 25th Rolling Stones studio album, is to take it to the dance floor. If you're even slightly cognizant of the Stones and you once spent your nights at a rock club, a roller rink, a beach party, hell, a parking lot with a boombox and a keg, when a certain sound kicks in you're going to feel it. There's a sudden spring in the hindquarters and your shoulders start to twitch and shimmy. Pretty soon the sway takes over, your torso undulating, your legs seemingly hyperventilating. Be careful of your neck because your head is going to start doing rooster moves. You have been started up.
With Mick Jagger as a model, this has been the physical effect of the funky white-boy blues in which the Stones have stayed grounded for nearly 65 years, and the Foreign Tongues rollout has fully leaned into it. Each of the videos released for the album's three advance singles show people in its throes. The chugging blues of "Rough and Twisted" prompts a dancer in a business suit to disrobe and gyrate like one of the deranged yuppies in Robert Longo's 1980s paintings. For the disco-kissed soul ballad "Jealous Lover," actors Charles Melton and Anya Taylor-Joy perform a tortured duet in the lobby of a seedy motel. The big-budget clip for "In the Stars" — a blithe if still urgent twist on "Gimme Shelter"-style prophesying — brings the band back into the picture, digitally de-aged to match their Let It Bleed glory days, and features Odessa A'zion in hot pants licking Mick's cheek and swanning through a packed room of musicians, dancers and decadent hangers-on who miraculously multiply as everyone gets their rocks off.
The overall effect of Foreign Tongues meeting its public has been appropriately gleeful. Even skeptics about pop-mega producer Andrew Watt's contributions (his amped-up yet orderly sound won the band a Grammy for 2023's Hackney Diamonds) are ecstatic that Mick sounds so hearty and Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood can still lock in with the band's now seasoned late-career rhythm section, bassist Darryl Jones and drummer Steve Jordan, to come up with new variations on the riff-and-boogie that changed rock and roll. Whatever doubts older fans may have about their enduring authenticity and younger listeners may feel about their relevance, the physical energy displayed throughout Foreign Tongues astounds, a case of rockmaxxing that leaves the band's youngers behind with mouths agape.
But, you may say, it's just the Stones again. You are correct. Foreign Tongues is basically a tour of the band's musical variations, with a few notable sidesteps. Blues is the album's foundation, and one of its delights is the way it recalls the many ways Jagger and Richards chased that evolving form and blended it with other styles throughout their career. Muddy Waters receives his due, but there's also the Alabama boogie of "Divine Intervention," the glammy strut of "Side Effects," the Cote D'Azur torchiness of "Back In Your Life" and a little NYC punk thanks to "Hit Me In the Head." Of course, Keith gets his ballad, and there's a Chuck Berry cover alongside a less expected Amy Winehouse rework. Even a casual Glimmer Twins fan will experience this album as an arm-in-arm tour through the band's most extroverted moments.
Some, like me, might miss the generative muck of their psychedelic experiments and the true dark edge of decadence that they once explored with considerable consequences. But Mick was always more about clean living than he admitted, and as the driving force behind the band's survival, he's shaping his legacy in ways that downplay its controversies. All in good fun! That's the message of Foreign Tongues, even when the lyrics stick pins in the rich (um, sir, I want to say to Mr. Jagger, net worth $500 million), express ugly emotions or, most startlingly, directly address the specter of death.
"My mood is down and my tongue's getting rough," Mick snarls in "Side Effects" before quickly revealing that it's not an incorrect dose of an ACE inhibitor but a broken heart that's got him down. He works the same trick in the punk-inspired "Hit Me in the Head," barking out a chorus about preferring assisted suicide to waiting around for the Reaper. His fickle lover did that to him, the song says, but it's impossible to not hear a little pathos in the refrain, especially because the recording was one of the band's last sessions with original drummer Charlie Watts, who succumbed to cancer in 2021.
Greeting death with a roar is fun, ribbing Elon Musk is fun, everything feels cheery on Foreign Tongues simply because the Stones are still with us and we are so very grateful. I'm speaking as a fan here, fully aware that plenty of music lovers bear no love for the group, especially considering their history of ingesting Black American styles in ways that many have found deeply problematic and their record of allowing the women who supported them in their younger days to become casualties of a rock-and-roll lifestyle they so effectively glamorized. Despite the inclusion of two apocalyptic prophecies ("In the Stars" and "Divine Intervention" both show an awareness of the climate crisis), Jagger's lyrics remain mostly upbeat even when he's dealing with heartbreak. Only the coy lament "Back In Your Life" feels melancholy, and only Winehouse's "You Know I'm No Good" invites real judgment of an untrustworthy narrator. Even the "Sympathy For the Devil" redux "Mr. Charm" ends on a positive note: "Life's too short to waste it living it all alone."
The cheeriness could come off as distasteful, even callous; after all, many people in their final years end up alone because loved ones have died or they've grown infirm, common catastrophes from which the Stones have not been exempt. Mick Jagger has a young family and Keith Richards remains ensconced in his healthy marriage to Patti Hansen, welcoming great-grandchildren; Ronnie Wood has survived cancer twice and spends his off time painting seascapes. These are lucky men enjoying all the advantages. Throughout Foreign Tongues, they wear that entitlement lightly; they're not striving to be cool or to make a particularly powerful statement. Rockmaxxing Stones-style isn't about achieving immortality. It's about relaxing into the basic pleasures that always made life a little lighter, and letting them help you face the tough stuff.
Instead of a self-reckoning, what Foreign Tongues offers is a self-tribute grounded in generosity and jovial self-deprecation. It feels like a very healthy way to face one's inevitable demise. Consider legendary former addict Keith's response to yet another question about his unlikely longevity: "This could be the last time? I wrote it, mate!" Instead of simply resting high on a mountain of cash and mystique, the Stones are doing what all those maxxers say people should do — they're touching grass and doubling down on what they feel they were born to do. The playful feeling that permeates these songs downplays the band's momentous role in rock's history, asking listeners to imagine the Stones again as scrappy strivers, just one band of pretenders among many.
It's patently ridiculous, if not uncommon, for men who fly in private planes to lament their distance from the streets. What makes Foreign Tongues plausible is the way the band continually undercuts itself. Only two songs last more than five minutes, and everything moves along at a clip. Now supported by a Black rhythm section, and in the wake of the album of blues covers that started this late-season victory lap, Jagger, Richards and Wood no longer seem interested in projecting ownership or even an alchemical absorption of sources they continue to mine; instead, they're bent on proving that the blues and early rock and roll still fully deserve listeners' attention.
Freed from satanic mystique or trend-chasing chic, Foreign Tongues proves that the main energy of the Stones still emanates from the lessons they learned from heroes whose names deserve to be repeated. With nothing left to prove, the Stones just want to remind us that the licks, riffs and grooves that are foundational in rock can still sustain big emotions and full-body thrills — and that their appeal transcends any generation gap. "Drive me where I wanna go," Mick sings. "To Natchez, Mississippi, Sicily and Rome." He recognizes that he never would have made it around the world if not for the first stop on that itinerary, and that's where he wants us to plant our moving feet.
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