On a clear night over the River Thames, a swarm of drones flickered to life, assembling into the unmistakable lips-and-tongue logo of the Rolling Stones. The display, part of a launch party for the band’s new album “Foreign Tongues,” drew a small crowd that included Mick Jagger and Ronnie Wood. Jagger, 82, told Reuters that he and Wood were “really into” the idea of a tour. “We hope we see everyone on the road,” he said, as the drones scattered and reformed into other shapes above the water.

“Foreign Tongues,” the group’s 25th studio album and second since the death of drummer Charlie Watts in 2021, arrives just over two years after “Hackney Diamonds.” Brazilian music writers noted that many of its 14 tracks were cut during the same sessions with producer Andrew Watt, and that the record carries a similar energy. Guest appearances abound: Paul McCartney plays bass, Robert Smith of The Cure added vocals and guitar after dropping by the studio to listen, and Bruno Mars contributed a cowbell part. The album also contains one of Watts’s final recordings, on the track “Hit Me in the Head.” Lyrically, Jagger takes aim at “autocrats” and, in the song “Mr. Charm,” at a “mad billionaire Mr. Musk,” according to Brazilian reviewers.

Half a world away, another veteran act was also extending its narrative. Green Day announced a soundtrack album for “Nimrods,” a coming-of-age film co-developed by the band and director Lee Kirk. The story follows three teenagers who mistakenly believe they have landed a support slot for a Green Day New Year’s Eve concert and embark on a cross-country road trip to Los Angeles. The film draws on the band’s own pre-fame adventures, and the soundtrack, due in July, will include a new song, described by Indonesian media as raw and energetic, titled “I’m Never Gonna R.I.P.” alongside catalogue tracks. Indonesian outlets also reported that the band had held open casting calls for young punk, emo, and hardcore fans to appear as extras. Meanwhile, in the same country, media published Indonesian translations of Oasis’s “Wonderwall,” a 1995 song whose lyrics about a person who “saves” the narrator continue to resonate across languages and generations.

The parallel activity is not a coincidence of the news cycle but a sign of how rock’s elder statesmen are navigating their later decades. Rather than retreating into nostalgia packages, the Stones are releasing new material that, as Brazilian critics observed, engages with contemporary political anger while still sounding unmistakably like themselves. Green Day are turning their origin story into a film that invites a new generation of fans to inhabit it. And the quiet persistence of lyric translations in Southeast Asian media suggests that the songs of the 1990s have become a kind of global folk music, passed along with the same care as a phrasebook. As the drone lights faded over the Thames, Jagger was already talking about the next tour. The road, it seems, still winds.