The Rolling Stones can’t sand down the monotony of Foreign Tongues

In the music video for “In the Stars,” the remaining official members of the Rolling Stones—frontman Mick Jagger, guitarist Keith Richards, and multi-instrumentalist Ronnie Wood—perform a new song while wearing young skin. Now all in their eighties, the band de-aged themselves by working with Deep Voodoo, the AI deepfake company from South Park creators Trey Park and Matt Stone, to recreate their 1970s-era physical appearances. “It’s in the stars, it’s our destiny,” Jagger wails with earnest grandeur as a bunch of people dance around the band with wild abandon at some nondescript house party. 

It scans as a love letter to their younger, sinewy selves. But by fabricating their appearances to resemble how they looked at the start of a such a pivotal decade in their career—one in which they released classics such as Sticky Fingers, Exile on Main Street, and Some Girls—it feels like they’re trying to remind us of the greatness that once was the rock and roll entity known as the Rolling Stones and the legacy that would soon follow. But it doesn’t feel like they’re trying to convince us that their current form holds up to their halcyon days. Foreign Tongues, their third album of original material this century, says as much.

Andrew Watt, the man who has become famous for infusing late-career lifeblood into beloved rock institutions like Pearl Jam, Ozzy Osbourne, and Iggy Pop, reprises his role behind the boards that he previously helmed for 2023’s Hackney Diamonds. Like that album, Watt’s pristine polish sands down the edges and defangs the Stones’ guitar solos, and the shambolic rowdiness that defines the band’s best work is almost entirely absent. Steve Jordan’s drums sound sterile and lifeless on “Never Wanna Lose You,” a song whose most noteworthy trait is that the Cure’s Robert Smith and Bruno Mars perform on it. Opener “Rough and Twisted” plays like faux-gnarly blues, suited to an old dive bar that recently underwent a refurbishment and added neon signs in a misunderstanding of its original appeal. Meanwhile, “In the Stars” is as manufactured and synthetic as the deepfakes in its music video, with its over-compressed guitars and chintzy keys.

The band members’ checked-out performances only exacerbate the record’s most glaring stumbles. Jagger commits lyrical clunkers that he does his damndest to make work, as if he’s solving a Rubik’s cube by forcing it with the grip strength of a professional arm wrestler. He rhymes “chemical” with “obsessional” on “Side Effects,” and he sees “neurons go flash in my brain” when his subject “quotes some verse to me to show that you sparkled” on the maudlin ballad “Back in Your Life.” Vocally, there’s much to be desired, too. “Jealous Lover” and “Mr. Charm” have Jagger croaking like Toad at a night of drunken karaoke, and Richards sounds taciturn and uninspired on “Some of Us,” a mandatory phone-flashlight moment at stadium shows for fans to politely humor while they wait for “Street Fighting Man” and “Midnight Rambler.” Fortunately, a posthumous performance by longtime drummer Charlie Watts injects much-needed verve with a propulsive backbeat into “Hit Me in the Head.”  

Among the greatest contributions to Foreign Tongues’ tedium is its hour-plus runtime. Superfluous, paint-by-numbers covers of Amy Winehouse’s “You Know I’m No Good” and Chuck Berry’s “Beautiful Delilah”—the latter of which features Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Chad Smith on concert bass drum, for some reason—pad out a record already in need of gratuitous editing. Not even an additional Robert Smith appearance on “Divine Intervention” can summon the vigor required to animate what is, by and large, a monotonous slog. 

Taken as a whole, Foreign Tongues feels impulsive and haphazard, as if the Stones had a bunch of leftover material from the Hackney Diamonds sessions that they simply didn’t know what to do with. Although a carefree attitude can work to a band’s benefit, favoring spontaneity in lieu of overthinking it, that mindset can also lead to a bevy of clutter that muddies the creative waters. The Rolling Stones’ latest album too often falls into that latter camp. When you revisit records like Aftermath and Let It Bleed, you’re reminded that this band is responsible for some of the most vital and influential music ever made. As suggested by that video for “In the Stars,” it seems like the band itself would also rather think about the past. [Polydor/Geffen]

Grant Sharples is a writer, journalist, critic, and musician. His work has also appeared in Interview Magazine, Uproxx, Pitchfork, Stereogum, The Ringer, NME, and other publications. He lives in Kansas City. You can follow him everywhere @grantsharpies.

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