Rolling Stones Release „Foreign Tongues“ With McCartney and Watts
The band's 25th studio album pairs star guests with a track recorded during one of Charlie Watts's final sessions, three years after „Hackney Diamonds“.
- The Rolling Stones released their 25th studio album „Foreign Tongues“ on July 10, 2026, their first record of original material since „Hackney Diamonds“ in 2023.
- Guests include Paul McCartney, Bruno Mars, Steve Winwood, Robert Smith of The Cure and Chad Smith of Red Hot Chili Peppers.
- The album features a track recorded with late drummer Charlie Watts during one of his final sessions.
- Lead single „In the Stars“ arrived on May 5, preceded by a teaser campaign under the band's historic alias „The Cockroaches“.
There is a moment on every Rolling Stones record, usually somewhere in the second third, when you hear a cymbal hit that did not have to be there and yet lands perfectly. On „Foreign Tongues“ that moment carries the signature of a man who is no longer here. Charlie Watts’s drumming, captured during one of his final sessions before his death in 2021, made its way onto a new song as the quietest, and in truth the loudest, guest on the album. This is not a marketing trick built up into a campaign, it is the dramatic arc of the whole record, because everything else on it seems to exist in order to lead toward that beat.
„Foreign Tongues“, released on July 10, is the band’s 25th studio album and its first with new, original material since „Hackney Diamonds“ in 2023. It was produced by Andrew Watt, who over recent years has become a kind of conservator of the classic rock sound, and was recorded over a month in London. A gap of only three years, by the standards of a band that once fell silent for a decade at a time, feels almost feverish.
Who sings on this record?
The guest list reads like the invitations to a wedding people remember. Paul McCartney, who already played bass on „Hackney Diamonds“, is back. Steve Winwood brings organ and that particular sixties warmth. Bruno Mars adds a voice a generation removed from Mick Jagger’s, yet oddly it does not stick out. Robert Smith of The Cure and Chad Smith of Red Hot Chili Peppers round out a company that spans everything from blues to stadium punk.
The danger with any project like this is that it turns into a gallery of famous faces, an album you listen to as a game of naming the voices. The Rolling Stones, happily, are old enough and stubborn enough to keep the guests in service of the songs rather than the other way around. Winwood’s organ does not ask for applause, it simply holds the song together. That is the difference between collaboration and marketing, and „Foreign Tongues“, in its best moments at least, stays on the side of the former.
Why release the album now?
The teaser campaign under the name „The Cockroaches“, the alias the band once used to play incognito, revealed that Jagger and Richards still understand the value of the game before the cards land on the table. Lead single „In the Stars“ appeared on May 5 and announced a record that does not try to be a last word, only one more sentence in a sentence that has run for six decades.
What sets „Foreign Tongues“ apart is not the star lineup but the fact that a band this late in life still records as if it has something to lose. Watts is present as a reminder that time is not an abstraction, that every session may be the last, and that rock, that supposedly immortal genre, is after all made of people who age and depart. The record knows this, which is why it sounds less like a farewell than like a continuation in spite of everything.
Would you rather have a band that stays silent and waits for the perfect moment, or one that records while it still can, knowing the perfect moment never comes?
