Rolling Stones drop two singles, announce Foreign Tongues

There is a moment in the Jealous Lover video where Anya Taylor-Joy stares straight into the lens while a falsetto trembles behind her, the kind of voice you would recognize through a ten-storey wall. That is Mick Jagger, well into his eighties, still convinced that a song about jealousy should sound like someone just slammed a door. The rock veterans have no intention of fading into silence, and this June made that point louder than the last few years combined.

On June 26 the band released two new singles, Jealous Lover and Divine Intervention, as a preview of the studio album Foreign Tongues, arriving July 10. Both songs follow the same logic that shaped the band’s recent work: the old Stones skeleton, dressed up with carefully chosen guests who change the temperature of the sound without touching its signature.

What do the new songs actually deliver?

Jealous Lover is a soul and R&B collaboration with Steve Winwood, whose organ gives the track that hot, sweaty texture the Stones have loved ever since they decided the blues was a working tool rather than a museum piece. Jagger’s vocal here is not a display of power but a performance, a return to the figure of a man whose jealousy is eating away at his reason. The video, directed by Chris Barrett and Luke Taylor, pushes the song further toward cinema, with Anya Taylor-Joy and Charles Melton in the lead roles.

Divine Intervention takes a different road. It is one of two album tracks featuring Robert Smith, the man whose voice has defined the melancholy of The Cure for decades. The collision of two such recognizable sensibilities, Jagger’s theatricality and Smith’s introspection, is the most intriguing part of the whole announcement, because this is not a cameo for the sake of a headline but a genuine meeting of two ways of singing about unrest.

What links both singles is the absence of nostalgia as an alibi. The Stones are not recording to remind us they exist, but to say something now, a rare luxury for a band that long ago ran out of things to prove.

A band that refuses to be a monument

It is easy to reduce the Rolling Stones to statistics, to decades, to stadium tours and the fact that they have outlived more musical fashions than most bands ever get to witness. But Foreign Tongues points to something less obvious: there is a difference between surviving and being present. The first is passive, the second requires a decision.

The collaborations with Winwood and Smith are less a marketing move than an admission that sound renews itself through other voices. A band that could have recycled its own hits until the end of time chooses instead to let strangers into the room, to let the sound wobble a little, to let something creak. That is not a safe calculation, it is a risk, and risk in your eighties is not obligatory.

The album lands in a matter of days, and only then will we see whether these two singles hint at the whole or are simply the two strongest cards drawn early. Until then, one question keeps returning with every new release from this band: is it even fair to measure the Stones by their years, or should we listen to them as if they never started aging at all?