The Rolling Stones unveiled their 25th studio album, Foreign Tongues, at the converted Williamsburgh Savings Bank in Brooklyn this week, hosted by Conan O'Brien with Leonardo DiCaprio and Lindsey Vonn in attendance. The album drops July 10 on Polydor. Lead single "In the Stars" — a piano-driven pop-rock track with a Keith Richards riff under the chorus — is out now.
Who's on the Record
Andrew Watt produced. The 14-track LP was cut between Henson Recording Studios in Los Angeles and Metropolis Studios in London across four sessions spanning 2021, 2022, and 2025–2026. Ten tracks are new; four are pulled from previous sessions, including the only material the band recorded with Charlie Watts before his death in 2021. That's the late drummer's final appearance on a Stones record.
Guest list reads like a tour of the last five decades of British rock: Paul McCartney, Steve Winwood, Robert Smith of The Cure, and Chad Smith of the Red Hot Chili Peppers. McCartney also played bass on "Bite My Head Off" from 2023's Hackney Diamonds, so this isn't his first Stones appearance — but two consecutive Stones albums with a Beatle on the credits is a 60-year reversal of one of rock's foundational rivalries. Mick Jagger noted that "Paul really wanted to jump in there"; Ronnie Wood said McCartney "wanted to tick that box."
Why Brooklyn
The launch event matters as much as the music. The Stones haven't done a New York album rollout since the late-90s era of Bridges to Babylon. Choosing the Williamsburgh Savings Bank — a 1929 Beaux-Arts landmark in Fort Greene that Brooklyn developers have spent two decades trying to figure out what to do with — locates the album geographically and aesthetically: an aging institution restored, repurposed, and made fashionable by a younger creative class. That's the band's brand position in 2026, intentionally or not.
O'Brien hosting is part of the play too. He has spent the last few years building Conan O'Brien Must Go and his podcast network into one of the most credible interview platforms left in legacy media. Pairing the Stones with O'Brien is a softer version of the same logic that put McCartney on the record: rock royalty introducing rock royalty to a younger audience that has stopped paying attention to album rollouts but still listens to podcasts.
The Stakes for July
Hackney Diamonds debuted at No. 1 in the UK in 2023 and earned a Grammy nomination for Album of the Year — the first new Stones LP to do so since 1981. Gold Derby's Grammy projection already has Foreign Tongues in the early Album of the Year conversation for the 2027 ceremony.
What makes the timing interesting: this is the second Stones LP in three years from a band that took 18 years between A Bigger Bang (2005) and Hackney Diamonds (2023). Either Andrew Watt has unlocked something about how Mick Jagger writes at 82, or the band understands it has a closing window and is choosing to spend it making records. Either way, July's release will be the first time since the early 80s that a Stones album has felt like a current event rather than a legacy one.
Source: Rolling Stone · NME · Wikipedia
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