The Rolling Stones: Foreign Tongues review – stomping blues and anti-Musk politics make this another late triumph

(Polydor)
Continuing the rejuvenated sound of 2023’s Hackney Diamonds, there’s touching vulnerability from Keith Richards while Jagger confronts war and autocracy

Mick Jagger recently launched the Rolling Stones’s 25th album declaring, “The thing about this record is, the Stones are a rock band that also has the capacity to do ballads, country music or dance music. So we don’t get stuck in one kind of style.” The same could be said of numerous bands, but what the singer was probably driving at was that the Stones have always been able to do all this while sounding utterly like themselves. Nobody else has been able to assemble their quintessentially just-shaky Jenga tower of sound, which often sounds like it could fall to pieces at any moment but somehow never does.

They have certainly also made their share of albums that sounded like they’d been phoned in from the cricket, but Foreign Tongues continues the creative renaissance that began with 2023’s Hackney Diamonds, which at the time was their first album of original songs in 18 years. Once again, producer and occasional musician Andrew Watt captures the rejuvenated band’s joy of playing in a room together – and, as guitarist Keith Richards put it recently, kicks their asses when needed. Perhaps drummer Charlie Watts’ death five years ago has sharpened the founding pair’s awareness that their band may not last much longer, so they may as well go down blazing and have fun while they do so.
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