On “Divine Intervention,” a cheery song about ignoring the apocalypse from the Rolling Stones‘ upcoming 25th album, Mick Jagger confesses he once worried enough about end times to consult a Hollywood psychic. “Through the gloom, I asked her, ‘What’s my future?’/Well, she threw up,” he whines over Some Girls-style guitar boogie. Jagger’s message in the chorus is that even when the world is ending, “Dystopian values are too hot to handle, and I’m going out in a blaze.” Now that’s more like it.
After all, the guy who sang both “Time Is on My Side” and “Time Waits for No One” — the guy who once said he’d rather be dead than sing “Satisfaction” at 45 — never seemed to care all that much about the future, anyway. Jagger, who will turn 83 shortly after the album’s July 10 release date, has always sung about living in the present. In the Sixties, when Paul McCartney was elegantly mourning a breakup on “Yesterday,” Jagger was hectoring “Yesterday’s Papers” at his ex. And where Macca’s excellent new album found him reminiscing about The Boys of Dungeon Lane, the Boys of Dartford Station are more interested in foreign affairs.
“Ringing Hollow,” a loping country rocker that recalls Gram Parsons’ influence on the Stones, is Jagger and Keith Richards‘ kiss-off letter to the U.S. “Well, I was madly in love with you/Before we ever met,” Jagger sings. “I saw all your movies/I smoked your cigarettes.” But now, Jagger sings, “Lady Liberty is wearing a frown.” It’s an Americana folk song filled with wry, ironic observations like, “Let the dreamers get the dream they want, my favorite joke/So pass around the fenty/Pass around the coke.… When voices are stifled/I wanna scream out loud.” Ouch! You know they still love their American fans, but as with “Sweet Neo Con,” “Undercover of the Night,” and “Street Fighting Man,” when the Stones see injustice, they’re gonna shake their lips.
Meanwhile, on “Divine Intervention,” one of the best songs on Foreign Tongues, with a great bluesy solo from Ronnie Wood, Jagger describes “billionaires all scuttling, scrambling to their bolt holes in the sky.” On “Covered in You,” he raps, “I wake up sick and tired of all these autocrats/You know, they seem to be breeding like a swarm of dirty rats with their missiles on parade.” He never calls out Trump by name, but he does zing one of the president’s cronies on “Mr. Charm,” otherwise a whimsical gigolo anthem, when he refers to the world’s first trillionaire as “mad mogul Mr. Musk.”
On “Never Wanna Lose You,” a pop-rock song with funky bass and the Cure’s Robert Smith on synths, Jagger shows life’s other side when he tells his lover that he’d even live with her in Naples — though he may mean Naples, Florida, since he describes “a rundown trailer park.” Politics, as Aristotle said, is the struggle between the poor and the rich, after all. (And in true Jagger fashion, this man of wealth and taste also never acknowledges his own or his bandmates’ multimillionaire status.)
The new LP arrives three years after Hackney Diamonds. That record felt like a comeback of sorts, since it was their first album of original music in nearly two decades, and, well, it was pretty great. It won the band — which now includes bassist Darryl Jones and drummer Steve Jordan — a Grammy and established them as England’s oldest hitmakers. Foreign Tongues, which likely collects Diamond cuts that were still in the rough last time, feels like business as usual for the group, in an effective way, since the recording cultivated equal results.
The record’s 14 songs include joint-ripping rockers (“Hit Me in the Head,” “Rough and Twisted”), ballads filled with sweeping exits and offstage lines (“Back in Your Life” and Richards’ excellent “Some of Us”), disco heartbreakers (“Jealous Lover,” “Never Wanna Lose You”), country honks (“Ringing Hollow”), and Chuck Berry riffs galore (literally on a reverent cover of Berry’s “Beautiful Delilah”). There are no sharp turns or pop experiments here, just the satisfaction of Stones-y comfort food.
After all, the Stones know what a Stones record should sound like. Their fidelity to the blues, R&B, and early rock & roll remains intact — and in case they stray, they have Andrew Watt, who also helmed Hackney Diamonds, guiding them. He’s listed as producer and even got a handful of rare writing co-credits alongside Jagger and Richards, but he should’ve probably also gotten one for “conscience,” as well, since, as superfan extraordinaire, he helped remind them of their quintessence: warm, bluesy riffs paired with Jagger’s scabrous irony.
The album’s only real “What are they doing?” moments are Jagger’s rap on the otherwise great “Covered in You” — which finds McCartney playing an upbeat groove on bass as Jagger says something about “wait till you see the whites of their asses” — and a fairly conventional cover of Amy Winehouse’s “You Know I’m No Good,” the best part of which is Jagger mimicking Mark Ronson’s production on his harmonica. And all that’s missing are lengthy jams, a midnight ramble or a “Gimme Shelter” tempest, but the album largely gives what Stones fans need.
As with Hackney Diamonds, the guest list runs deep: McCartney, Smith, Steve Winwood (who sticks to piano and organ), the Heartbreakers’ Benmont Tench (on organ), and Bruno Mars, who plays practically inaudible cowbell on the baby-please-don’t-go disco party rave-up “Never Wanna Lose You.” As with Hackney Diamonds, the most notable appearance is by the late, great Charlie Watts on the “Hang Fire”-style death wish “Hit Me in the Head,” recorded in 2021 — and that’s no disrespect to Jordan, who swings differently and hits harder.
The album sounds a little overly slick at times, but mostly Foreign Tongues stays faithful to the Stones’ signature sound, or at least Watts’ idea of how the Stones should sound. There are no Dust Brothers beats of burden on this album, as there were on Bridges to Babylon. Jagger, Richards, and Wood know they’ll never top the winning streak that ran from Beggars Banquet to Exile on Main St. (not to overlook Aftermath or Some Girls or Tattoo You), so why not best Dirty Work and Voodoo Lounge, which they do exponentially here. Jagger’s voice is a modern marvel, sounding as good as it did 40 years ago; he even sings “You Know I’m No Good” in a higher key than Winehouse did. And Richards’ and Wood’s “ancient art of weaving” yields dense textures, especially on “Ringing Hollow,” that allow each of them to step out here and there with guitar showcases.
In some ways, Foreign Tongues is an improvement on Hackney Diamonds, in that the latter occasionally sounded a little too much like a Jagger solo record in its emphasis on vocal melodies; this one feels more guitar-centric and holistically Stones-y. The goal, as Watt has said, was to create songs that could translate well to the stadium stage, and the single “In the Stars” and “Never Wanna Lose You” could both do that should the band want to tour again.
As always, best songs happen when the Stones let it loose. On “Jealous Lover,” a funky soul number that recalls “Emotional Rescue,” Jagger breaks up with his lover in falsetto because she’s too jealous of other women (and, incidentally, he also never says he’s not cheating on her). And he embraces the fuckboy ethos on the playful “Mr. Charm,” on which he seduces a rich woman, telling her, “Life’s too short for just making money/Show me how to spend it, honey.” (In a rare acknowledgement of his own age, he admits on the song that while he once dreamed of roving Mars, he now prefers to stay home and “do anagrams, spew epigrams.”) Then there’s Richards’ “Some of Us,” a moving declaration of devotion whose origins as a song date back to the Eighties, on which he sings, “Some of us are on our knees, begging, baby.” There’s deep emotion and vulnerability in Richards’ voice, which occasionally interlace with Jagger’s, in a way that reflects a level of dedication that only comes with enduring love.
And on the topic of enduring love, the album ends with Jagger and Richards, in each other’s lives since age five, singing Berry’s “Beautiful Delilah,” with the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Chad Smith on “concert bass drum.” As with the Glimmer Twins performing Muddy Waters’ “Rolling Stone Blues” on Hackney Diamonds, their choice of Berry is a full-circle moment for the duo, since Jagger was carrying Waters and Berry records when he met Richards again at the Dartford train station, and the Stones’ first-ever single was a cover of Berry’s “Come On.” For four minutes again, they were Blues Incorporated, their first band. And you can tell that that original spark still flickers within them.
Jagger has said he hopes the Stones put out more records, but as he and Richards inch deeper into their eighties (Wood turns 80 next year), there’s always the feeling that this album may be the last time. They don’t know. If it is, though, Foreign Tongues is an album that lives up to their legacy.
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