In the spring of 2026, a rough-and-tumble blues-rock track surfaced online credited to a band called The Cockroaches. The pseudonym was a nod to the 1970s, when the Rolling Stones used it to slip into low-key club shows unnoticed. The song, “Rough and Twisted,” turned out to be the opener of their 25th studio album, “Foreign Tongues,” released on 10 July. The alias was fitting: like the insect, the band has proven almost impossible to kill, and the track’s shuffle rhythm and Mick Jagger’s preening vocal announced that the group, now in its seventh decade, was still intent on delivering the thrills.

The album itself was recorded in a burst of urgency. At west London’s Metropolis Studios, the core trio of Jagger, Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood, alongside producer Andrew Watt and a tight circle of musicians, cut 12 originals and two covers in under a month. The sessions, described in French and Italian reports as “rapido presto” and “fissa fissa,” recalled the band’s early days of time-pressed creativity. The late Charlie Watts, whose death in 2021 had spurred the group back into the studio for 2023’s “Hackney Diamonds,” appears posthumously on the punkish “Hit Me in the Head,” his drumming a ghostly presence. A roster of guests threads through the tracks: Paul McCartney lays down a melodic bassline on “Covered In You,” Robert Smith of The Cure adds synths and, according to a Swedish reviewer, a “divine” guitar intervention on “Divine Intervention,” and Bruno Mars contributes a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cowbell part.

The album arrives at a moment when the question of how long a rock band can endure without self-parody has become a cultural refrain. In a 1989 interview recalled by the French-language daily Le Devoir, Richards mused that he wanted to see “how far it is possible for a rock band to go, without denaturing itself.” Nearly four decades later, “Foreign Tongues” offers an answer that is neither uniform nor final. Some European critics noted an unevenness: a French reviewer observed that tracks like “In the Stars” felt like a copy-paste of the Stones’ own past, while the German tabloid Bild declared it the band’s strongest album since 1994’s “Voodoo Lounge.” What is consistent is the lyrical bite. Jagger takes aim at “mad mogul” Elon Musk in “Mr Charm” and, without naming Donald Trump, sketches a tattered American dream in the honky-tonk standout “Ringing Hollow”: “Lady Liberty don’t look so good when there’s a tear in her gown.”

The album’s release has been shadowed by a partnership with FIFA, including a limited-edition vinyl and World Cup collection, a move that drew sharp criticism from Swedish reviewers who called the football governing body “corrupt.” Yet the music itself, and the band’s stated desire to tour—Jagger told Reuters that he and Wood “really want to” hit the road, though Richards’ arthritis scuppered a European leg of the last tour—suggests a group still driven by the friction between mortality and motion. The cover art, a Nathaniel Mary Quinn painting that mashes up caricatured faces of Jagger, Richards and Wood, serves as a visual shrug at ageism. As the final notes of a blistering cover of Amy Winehouse’s “You Know I’m No Good” fade, the Stones leave behind an image not of finality, but of a band still rolling, still refusing to look away from the world outside the studio window.