What we saw at the Rolling Stones album launch event

Yesterday morning, the Rolling Stones announced their 25th studio album, Foreign Tongues, which will be released on July 10 via Capitol. That afternoon, I trekked to the Weylin, a stately former bank in Williamsburg, to listen to the band speak with Conan O’Brien about their latest foray. 

Here is a noncomprehensive list of things I saw and heard (without a media pass, because though I’m sure the Stones love indie magazines, the overworked Weylin employees were not to be convinced). The Weylin, a high-ceilinged neoclassical space you could imagine a very fancy junior prom taking place in, was bedecked with licking tongues and crowded by members of the media, cool-looking old guys, and “Access All Areas” superfans with passes that grant them lifelong access to Rolling Stones events. Owen Wilson famously got his pass stripped after nearly causing Mick Jagger to mess up a concert rendition of “Jumping Jack Flash”; sure enough, he was not present.

But there is no dearth of celebrities who have not jeopardized the band’s live performances. I saw Odessa A’zion, who is starring in a new music video for the band (more on this later). I saw a Wolff brother, I’m almost sure it was Alex. There was a masked Leonardo DiCaprio, who admittedly looked very much like he did not want to be seen. 

Confusingly, as we milled to our seats, the venue was playing Tom Waits, not the Stones. A cater-waiter was dodging septuagenarians as he offered them bao buns in some sort of loop-di-loop contraption—either a nod to Stonesian hedonism or the sort of capitalist malarkey you’d think they’d reject offhand. There was also a guy using ChatGPT on his computer next to me, which definitely seemed antithetical to the spirit of the event. Still, a hush spread quickly through the venue as Conan O’Brien, hair seven inches off his head at peak volume, emerged onstage. “I think this is going to be the album,” he said. “This is the first, after years of toiling in obscurity. It’s ab-so-fucking-lutely fantastic.” 

The excitement really was palpable as Mick Jagger, Ronnie Wood, and Keith Richards took the stage. A man made praying motions toward the trio; the guy next to me was practically vibrating. O’Brien congratulated the group on their upcoming album, which they apparently recorded in under a month at London’s Metropolis—a studio Jagger quipped was further into “leafy Chiswick,” a posh suburb of the city, than they’d ventured for prior records. There was an intense forward momentum to the way the three spoke about the album, especially Richards. “You always want to get better,” he rumbled. “There’s always something more in you. And if not, you croak.” Mick had a slightly different explanation for why the band keeps on chugging: Andrew Watt, the album’s producer (and that of 2023’s Hackney Diamonds), “kicks us in the ass.” 

To any concerned parties, though, I am happy to report that the trio sounded nowhere close to croaking. The lone sign of their age was that both Jagger and Richards were wearing rather orthopedic-seeming sneakers; Wood and Richards manspread with the vigor of far younger men, and Jagger’s voice rang as lucidly through the hall as it did when he was nineteen at the Marquee Jazz Club. “It could be 1968!” O’Brien told Jagger, describing his vocals on the album. “Well, I was taking a lot of drugs in 1968,” Jagger replied. 

The Stones also revealed several of the collaborators on their forthcoming album: Paul McCartney and Robert Smith will make vocal appearances: “finally,” McCartney apparently said to them after recording, “I can say I played with the Rolling Stones!”—despite having played bass on one Hackney Diamonds song. As for instrumentals, Stevie Winwood will feature on the piano, and the late Charlie Watts’ drums appear, thanks to recordings from 2020 and 2021 that make up four of the album’s fourteen tracks. For the other “new” songs, Steve Jordan, who Richards assured was “recommended by Charlie,” will step in. 

The talk wound down—a tight thirty; the Stones, as you would hope, had better things to do than entertain me—and three new tracks from the album played: the punky, drum-heavy “Mr. Charm,” to which Alex Wolff and I were both head-bopping; “Jealous Lover,” highlighted by Jagger’s ever-dependable falsetto; and, finally, the just-released “In the Stars”—a roiling, dreamy song full of enormous classic-Stones energy. For that last one, a raspy, explosive love tune, the band debuted a music video featuring A’zion as a young Jagger’s paramour. It ripped. Long live the Stones.

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