I’ll leave it to others to provide Foreign Tongues with the traditional blessing that greets every new Rolling Stones album—“it’s their best since Some Girls!”—but 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’s late-’70s phase. In the process, it also takes every ageist insult that’s been lobbed at the Stones over the years—they’re too old, too wrinkly, too decrepit—and rubs it in our faces. Where they once shocked the tabloids with their wanton drug use and cross-dressingthe cover reminds us that the most provocative thing the Stones can do these days is simply continue to exist as octogenarians.
But as much as the art suggests a rebirth of the band’s campy streak, it also reflects a mix-and-match approach to familiar Stonesy archetypes. Following 2023’s Hackney Diamonds (their first album of originals in nearly two decades, and first since the 2021 death of drummer Charlie Watts), Foreign Tongues marks the band’s second collaboration with Andrew Watt, the 35-year-old producer who’s 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’s reverence for Stones history and a shrewd knowledge of the precision mechanics practiced in pro songwriters’ rooms. The Stones may not be chasing the zeitgeist as flagrantly as they did in the late ’70s and ’80s, but, under Watt’s 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—i.e., songwriting as a neatly arranged procession of clippable moments.
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And so you have a lot of instances on Foreign Tongues where the band’s innate, let-it-loose swagger rubs up against this calculated craftiness to awkward effect. The “Parachute Woman”-goes-to-Vegas blues romp “Rough and Twisted” and the “Soul Survivor” riff-nicking strut “In the Stars” 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 “Covered in You” pits the bratty Jagger who breathlessly rapped his way through “Shattered” and “Dance (Pt. 1)” against the MOR Mick who made She’s the Boss. And then there’s the missed opportunity that is “Jealous Lover,” where Jagger’s falsetto tries to tickle your “Emotional Rescue” pleasure points, but the song forsakes deviant disco for a stately soul ballad that—like Beck circa “Debra”—blurs the line between sincere homage and comedy sketch.
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-style. Each come outfitted with a snotty rocker about inflicting violence on the noggin (“Bite My Head Off” vs. “Hit Me in the Head”), a mid-album country breather (“Dreamy Skies” vs. “Ringing Hollow”), a comforting, Keith-sung comedown track (“Tell Me Straight” vs. “Some of Us”), a blown-out gospel-ballad climax (“Sweet Sounds of Heaven” vs. “Back in Your Life”), and an album-closing return to the band’s blues roots through a stripped-down cover designed to sound like it was recorded in the Beggars Banquet toilet stall (Muddy Waters’ “Rolling Stone Blues” vs. Chuck Berry’s “Beautiful Delilah”). The celeb-stacked guest lists also overlap, with Paul McCartney and Benmont Tench showing up for another go-round, though Hackney ringers Lady Gaga and Elton John were apparently traded for Bruno Mars and Robert Smith in a blockbuster off-season deal. And there’s another posthumous appearance from Charlie to bridge the Stones’ Watts and Watt eras.
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