Foreign Tongues — The Rolling Stones invite Robert Smith, Paul McCartney, and a posthumous Charlie Watts to make their most outward-looking album in two decades

Foreign Tongues is The Rolling Stones’ 25th studio album, and it arrives with the kind of credentials that mark a departure rather than a continuation. Produced by Andrew Watt — who also produced Hackney Diamonds — the 14-track record features contributions from Paul McCartney, Steve Winwood, Bruno Mars, Chad Smith, and Robert Smith of The Cure: a collaborator list that treats the band’s established sound as a starting point rather than a destination.

The album’s title announces its methodology. Foreign Tongues suggests the Stones drawing from registers outside their natural vocabulary, and the presence of Robert Smith — the principal voice of post-punk’s more atmospheric wing — alongside Bruno Mars confirms that Andrew Watt took the brief seriously. What connects such different contributors is not genre but attitude: a willingness to let outside sensibilities into a room that has historically been the Stones’ alone.

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Steve Jordan handles the drums with authority, and his performance across the record is assured rather than compensatory. But Foreign Tongues also carries Charlie Watts: one track features a recording made before his death in 2021, placed in the album’s sequence not as a memorial gesture but as a contribution among contributions. It doesn’t announce itself. It sounds like Charlie Watts, which is exactly what it needed to do.

The 14-track listing covers considerable ground. “Rough and Twisted” opens on firm rock footing. “Ringing Hollow” pulls toward something more atmospheric. “Hit Me In The Head,” at under three minutes, delivers the compressed rock efficiency that the Stones have always deployed best when they stop trying to make statements and just make music. The range is genuine and, occasionally, the album’s structural coherence pays for it — 14 tracks with this many contributing voices can read as an index of ambitions rather than a record with a center.

Mick Jagger‘s vocals are arranged around what his voice actually does in 2026. The upper registers are narrower than they were; the mid-range has deepened. Foreign Tongues doesn’t pretend otherwise. That honesty about range is one of the album’s quiet virtues — a band choosing to work with what they have rather than reaching for what they used to have.

Foreign Tongues makes a credible argument that The Rolling Stones are still a working band with something to figure out. Not every track earns its presence across the record’s full length, and the sequencing across 14 songs occasionally feels more abundant than precise. But an album this stocked with collaboration and this willing to produce uneven results is, in the end, more honest than one that plays to comfort — and on that count, Foreign Tongues delivers.

Tags: rock, The Rolling Stones, Foreign Tongues

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