Foreign Tongues

Lore & Background

Foreign Tongues was first confirmed by Ronnie Wood in late September 2025, who told a UK publication that a new album would arrive the following year. The album was teased through a marketing campaign for the single "Rough and Twisted", credited to the pseudonym The Cockroaches, which was released on 11 April 2026 in only 1,000 vinyl copies. On 25 April 2026, the band posted twenty photographs on Facebook showing street views with posters announcing the words "Foreign Tongues" in different languages, later revealed as the album title. The cover art, a 2025 pastel drawing by American artist Nathaniel Mary Quinn titled Trinity, depicts a composite portrait of Wood, Richards, and Jagger with faces that "seem to merge into one". The album primarily consists of new material, with four compositions recorded during the band's previous album Hackney Diamonds, including "Covered In You". It also includes material from the band's final session with Charlie Watts in 2021.

Reader's Guide

Foreign Tongues represents a late-career addition to the Rolling Stones' discography, arriving six decades after the band's formation. The album debuted at number one in the United Kingdom, selling 38,016 copies in its first week, marking the band's fifteenth number-one album in the UK and tying them with the Beatles for the second most number-one albums in that country. In the United States, it debuted at number seven on the Billboard 200 with 54,000 album-equivalent units, becoming the band's thirty-ninth top-ten album on that chart. Critical reception was mixed: some reviewers praised its vitality and guitar-centric sound, while others criticized Andrew Watt's production as overly polished. The album's lead single "In the Stars" was released on 5 May 2026, backed with "Rough and Twisted", which had previously been released in limited quantities under the pseudonym The Cockroaches. A second single, "Jealous Lover", followed on 25 June 2026.

Did You Know?

• The album includes a song recorded with Charlie Watts during a session in Los Angeles shortly before his death in 2021.
• The lead single "Rough and Twisted" was initially released under the pseudonym The Cockroaches, a name the band used in the 1970s for secret shows.
• The album's cover art, a 2025 painting by Nathaniel Mary Quinn titled Trinity, was described as reminiscent of a 'better version of the cover to Metallica's 2016 album Hardwired... to Self-Destruct'.
• Foreign Tongues debuted at number one in the UK, tying the Rolling Stones with the Beatles for the second most number-one albums in UK chart history.