On the evening of 9 July, in a small London venue, Mick Jagger and Ronnie Wood took to a stage stripped of the usual stadium apparatus. The private performance, held to preview the Rolling Stones’ new album, placed the two men—82 and 79 years old, respectively—within arm’s reach of an audience that had not gathered to witness a farewell but to hear what a band in its seventh decade still considers worth saying. The set drew from Foreign Tongues, a fourteen-track collection that had been recorded barely a mile away, inside the brick shell of a former tram power station turned recording complex, Metropolis Studios.

That recording, completed in under a month, was described by Jagger as an intense, compressed burst of work. “We had fourteen fantastic tracks and we worked as fast as we could,” he said, noting that the room’s modest dimensions allowed him to “feel the passion of everyone.” Keith Richards, who at 82 has been open about the arthritis that forced the cancellation of a planned 2026 tour, called the sessions “a month of intense, concentrated energy.” The haste was not born of panic but of a logic that has settled over the group since the death of drummer Charlie Watts in 2021: time is no longer an abstraction. Russian media, reporting on the album’s release, underscored the health concerns that keep Richards from the road, while Latin American coverage marvelled at the sheer velocity of a band that, as the Argentine daily Clarín put it, “crossed the threshold of 80” and yet sounds “vigorous.”

The album’s architecture is built from familiar materials—blues shuffles, soul-inflected ballads, the interlocking guitar weave Richards calls “the ancient art of weaving”—but its lyrical gaze is fixed on the present. In “Mr. Charm,” Jagger spits a verse about a “mad mogul Mr. Musk” and the childhood dream of going to Mars, now curdled into a sardonic question about who to trust with a rocket. “Covered In You” opens with a couplet about waking “sick and tired of all these autocrats / breeding like a swarm of dirty rats.” French-language commentators noted that the album functions, in part, as a letter of disenchantment with the United States, a country the Stones once adopted as a second home. On “Ringing Hollow,” Jagger sings of a Lady Liberty who “doesn’t look too good when she’s scowling.” Italian critics, meanwhile, praised the record’s refusal to treat its own legacy as a burden; the daily Panorama argued that Foreign Tongues “does not try to rewrite the Stones’ history, but to continue writing it.”

The guest list reads like a roll-call of survivors and inheritors. Paul McCartney, 84, laid down a bass line for “Covered In You” in minutes, after Jagger asked him for something “dirty.” Robert Smith of The Cure contributed guitar and synthesizer textures, Steve Winwood’s Hammond organ threads through several tracks, and Bruno Mars is credited—without fanfare—on cowbell. The most spectral presence, however, belongs to Charlie Watts, whose drumming and voice fragments were retrieved from earlier sessions and woven into “Hit Me in the Head.” Brazilian and Spanish-language outlets noted that the track serves as an unadorned tribute, not a commercial gimmick.

What lingers after the final track—a cover of Chuck Berry’s “Beautiful Delilah”—is the image on the album’s cover. The American painter Nathaniel Mary Quinn assembled a composite face from the features of Jagger, Richards, and Wood: a single, fractured visage that is at once monstrous and familiar. It is, as the Swiss daily Le Temps observed, a “hideous collage” that nonetheless announces the record’s core message: the Stones are still here, not as a polished monument but as a living, lopsided thing, held together by the friction of its parts.