'Jagger’s voice sounds phenomenal': Pat Carty dives into the Rolling Stones' new album

Foreign Tongues features guests such as Robert Smith of The Cure, and Paul McCartney, but is it any good?

The remaining three members of the Rolling Stones: Ron Wood, Mick Jagger, and Keith Richards. Picture: Mark Seliger

Tue, 07 Jul, 2026 - 21:30

Pat Carty

When Charlie Watts passed in 2021 it looked to be finally over for the Rolling Stones. The push and pull between Watts’s swinging drums, Keith Richards’ piratically soulful guitar, and the strut and howl of Mick Jagger was the wild, elemental, life-changing sound of the greatest rock’n’roll band of all time.

But the show went on. The remaining band members finished the tour and caught us all on the hop with their first album of new material in 18 years. The biggest surprise was that 2023’s Hackney Diamonds was actually pretty good, although some critics, like this one, got slightly carried away. Still, for more than half of it, The Stones at the very least reminded you of themselves.

Suitably reenergised, they kept the ball in the air and now deliver relatively swift follow up Foreign Tongues. With some Hackney left-overs, some new songs, and a couple of covers, this one - against all odds - is pretty good too.

Alright, it’s not the greatest record ever, The Stones already having birthed that with 1972’s Exile On Main St, still humanity’s crowning glory. But it’s a sturdy construction that’ll put a smile on even the hopelessly dour and, while it doesn’t have anything quite as marvellous as Hackney’s Sweet Sounds Of Heaven, overall it’s more consistent.

The initial signs were better for a start. Unlike Angry, the generic lead Hackney single, Rough And Twisted, released under their semi-regular pseudonym The Cockroaches, has a real kick to it. Harking back to earlier days, and to 2016’s fire-stoking covers collection Blue & Lonesome, its blast of electric Chicago blues features a scuzzy central hurrah from Richards, giving Jagger something to stand on and shout from.

Second single In The Stars teleports in Richards’ patented 1970s chug with Jagger grafting a radio-friendly chorus to its raggedy chassis. Again, it’s no Tumbling Dice but it doesn’t sound like octogenarians shuffling through talent night down the old folk’s home either.

Jagger’s voice – studio trickery notwithstanding – sounds phenomenal on both albums, and he’s the central figure here. This is no bad thing, as Sticky Fingers and Some Girls were both Mick-heavy affairs and all the better for it. He’s still trying to get the leg over during the gas Mr Charm, berates an over-enthusiastic young one with his honking falsetto in Jealous Lover, and declares the only thing that’ll stop him is a dig to the skull in the furious Hit Me In The Head, the one track with Watts behind the kit.

Always an underrated lyricist he cleverly turns the seemingly standard country ballad Ringing Hollow into a lament for what America has lost, calls out Elon Musk, and even nods ruefully at the gang’s drug-driven past in Side Effects.

The stand-out Jaggery moment however takes place during the more-than-decent cover of Amy Winehouse’s You Know I’m No Good when he directs the object of his ardour, from the bathtub, to “Lick your lips as I soap my feet.” There’s an enduring image for you.

Keith Richards, the one-time walking laboratory who scuppered the plans for a European tour, sounds subdued at times, relying on loyal lieutenant Ronnie Wood to handle the majority of the heavy guitar lifting. But his turn at the microphone for Some Of Us, a song first attempted around 1986’s Dirty Work, provides a moment of real soul. When Jagger joins the chorus and the pair then trade lines towards the end, it puts a lump in the throat of this devotee.

Yes, one could certainly argue, as their best records are about feel over precision, that producer du jour Andrew Watt’s polish is too clean and tidy, the cover art is abominable, and The Stones don’t need guest stars. Paul McCartney is back on bass for Covered In You. Red Hot Chilli Pepper Chad Smith thumps a tub on Chuck Berry’s Beautiful Delilah, done as a porch front blues to close the circle opened by their 1963 debut single, Berry’s Come On. Most incongruously of all, The Cure’s Robert Smith is also in the background, although you’d have to be told it was him.

They’re all surplus to requirements, apart from the sympathetic keyboards of Steve Winwood, because this is the Rolling Stones, refusing to go gentle into that good night, and that is enough. Whether anything here will be of interest in a year’s time remains to be seen but for now this defiant jolt of joie de vivre - missing from most bands a quarter their age - gives hope to us all. Growing old doesn’t necessarily mean calming down.