Here's an idea that seems terrible: The Rolling Stones should start working on their next album.
Like now.
After taking nearly two decades to release 2023's “Hackney Diamonds,” the band's first set of original material since 2005's “A Bigger Bang,” the Stones return this week with a follow-up, “Foreign Tongues,” which took them less than 36 months to release.
And it is the best album in every sense.
In the old days, of course, two and a half years was all it took to make “Beggars Banquet,” “Let It Bleed.” and “Sticky fingers.” So let's not get carried away with the fact that Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood are working as fast as they do when they are in their 70s and 80s.
However, to listen to the energetic and sporty “Foreign Tongues” is to listen to a band that is clearly guided by instinct rather than overthinking the music in the style of any number of veteran acts in legacy maintenance mode. I don't know if the result is the Stones' best since 1978's “Some Girls,” but it's definitely their funniest, which is actually their most impressive achievement.
“You wake up in the morning and you want to make me throw up,” Jagger sneers on the punky “Hit Me in the Head,” exactly the kind of lyrics you'd expect to hear from a band whose only possible reason for staying in the game is to have a gas-gas-gas.
Like “Hackney Diamonds” – and, indeed, like Paul McCartney’s “The Boys of Dungeon Lane” (to name a recent LP from an overthinking veteran) – “Foreign Tongues” was produced by Andrew Watt, 35, who has made a career of helping boom icons add a little shine to their later-life efforts. And he's helped the Stones assemble an engaging, motley team of collaborators here, including McCartney (who plays bass on “Covered in You”), The Cure's Robert Smith (who contributes guitar on “Divine Intervention”), Steve Winwood (who plays piano and organ throughout the album), and Bruno Mars (who is credited with the cowbell on “Never Wanna Lose You”).
You also get a welcome appearance from the late Charlie Watts in a hard-hitting performance recorded before his death in 2021 (otherwise Steve Jordan keeps the time).
But none of the stunts feel like the point of the album, which instead simply scatters a dozen tunes in the Stones' various idioms (the blues stomp, the country lope, the sleazy disco jam) plus a couple of covers into just over an hour. He's playful and cheerful, even when Jagger laments what he sees as the sorry state of his beloved America in “Ringing Hollow” and when Richards complains that love brought him to his knees in “Some of Us.”
And when they go into leprechaun mode, they really lean into it: “Mr. Charm” is a demented soul-rock rave about how boring money is (okay, Mick) in which Jagger hurls an insult at “crazy tycoon Mr. Musk” in a verse expounding on the joys of staying home and doing anagrams.
On “Divine Intervention,” Jagger offers a colorful account of travels through New York and Los Angeles (“I kept moving to Silver Lake / To play guitar with a new friend of mine”), while Richards and Wood make their guitars slide all over the place. “Jealous Lover” is magnificently vulgar: a horny little strut that sounds like “Dirty Mind”-era Prince performing “Waiting on a Friend.” (Mick, legitimately crazy, speaks here.)
For God knows what reason, the Stones deliver a faithful rendition of Amy Winehouse's “You Know I'm No Good” with Jagger on harmonica. And the album ends with a very uneven version of Chuck Berry's “Beautiful Delilah,” obviously intended to recall how the two core members of the Stones came together more than half a century ago.
The memory is old; the emotion, in some way, is alive.
