On their new album Foreign Tongues, Keith Richards and his bandmates lean on Andrew Watt’s urgency and modern studio instincts without surrendering the unruly character that has defined them for more than six decades.
LONDON — At 82, Keith Richards has little interest in treating the Rolling Stones as a museum piece.
The guitarist remains physically marked by age and arthritis, but his belief in the band’s creative future appears undiminished. With the release of Foreign Tongues on July 10, the Stones have delivered their second album of original material in less than three years—a pace they had not maintained since the 1980s.
The record follows the success of 2023’s Hackney Diamonds and extends what has become an unexpected late-career revival. Rather than simply revisiting familiar hits, Mick Jagger, Richards and Ronnie Wood have returned to the studio with a renewed appetite for writing, recording and testing the boundaries of their established sound.
Central to that resurgence is Andrew Watt, the 35-year-old American producer whose career has moved between contemporary pop and veteran rock royalty. A Grammy-winning producer, songwriter and guitarist, Watt has worked with performers including Lady Gaga, Elton John, Ozzy Osbourne, Pearl Jam and Paul McCartney. He also produced Hackney Diamonds, establishing a relationship with the Stones that continued into the new record.
The generational contrast is striking. Watt was born decades after the Stones formed in London in 1962, yet his role is not to modernise the group through fashionable electronic effects or force its music into current pop formulas. Instead, he has encouraged the musicians to perform together with the urgency of a working rock band.
Reports from the recording sessions describe an approach centred on capturing live interaction in the studio. That method preserves the small imperfections, changes of tempo and clashes of personality that have long been essential to the Stones’ sound.
Watt’s contribution is also organisational. Richards and Jagger have one of rock music’s most durable creative partnerships, but their relationship has often been defined by disagreement as much as collaboration. The producer has acted as an energetic intermediary, pushing sessions forward while navigating the tensions between the two musicians.
For Richards, that pressure appears to be productive. He has never been known for rushing songs to completion, and some Stones compositions have taken years to reach their final form. In a recent interview, he recalled that “Start Me Up” developed over roughly a decade, initially taking shape around a reggae rhythm before becoming the 1981 rock anthem known today. He compared the process to allowing wine to mature.
A track on the new album, “Some of Us,” reportedly followed a similarly prolonged path. Richards delivers one of the record’s most prominent vocal performances on the song, bringing a weathered emotional quality that contrasts with Jagger’s sharper, more theatrical presence.
That contrast remains one of the Stones’ defining strengths. Jagger supplies motion, provocation and control; Richards provides looseness, texture and an instinctive connection to blues and early rock ’n’ roll. Watt’s achievement lies in allowing those forces to remain distinct while directing them toward a coherent album.
Foreign Tongues, the band’s 25th studio album, contains 14 tracks and moves through blues rock, country influences, hard-driving guitar music and reflective ballads. Critics have described it as a continuation of the creative burst that began with Hackney Diamonds, rather than a collection assembled merely to support the Stones’ legacy.
The guest list reinforces the album’s intergenerational reach. Paul McCartney appears after previously playing bass on “Bite My Head Off” from Hackney Diamonds. Other contributors include Steve Winwood, Robert Smith, Bruno Mars and Red Hot Chili Peppers drummer Chad Smith.
One of the record’s most emotionally significant elements is the presence of the late Charlie Watts. The Stones’ longtime drummer, who died in 2021, is heard in material recorded before his death. His contribution gives the album a direct connection to the group’s classic lineup while underscoring how significantly the band has changed.
Steve Jordan has assumed drumming responsibilities in the Stones’ continuing work, but Watts’s restrained, unmistakable rhythm remains part of the group’s identity. His appearance on the album is not presented simply as nostalgia; it becomes part of a record concerned with endurance, loss and the problem of continuing after essential figures are gone.
Those themes are increasingly unavoidable. Jagger is 83, Wood is 79 and Richards is 82. The Rolling Stones can no longer discuss their future without questions about health, mortality and whether each new album or performance might be their last.
Yet the musicians have resisted presenting Foreign Tongues as a farewell. Reports suggest that they have additional songs in development, and Richards has left open the possibility of future performances, even though a major 2026 tour is not planned. He has indicated that the band could return to the stage in 2027, potentially through selected concerts or a residency rather than another exhausting global itinerary.
That uncertainty gives the record added weight without turning it into an obituary. Its significance rests less on the age of the musicians than on their refusal to behave as though creativity has an expiration date.
The collaboration with Watt is crucial to that refusal. Younger producers working with established artists can sometimes become overly respectful, preserving every familiar habit rather than challenging it. Watt appears to take the opposite approach: admiring the Stones’ history while demanding that they work in the present.
His experience across pop and rock also enables him to bridge audiences. He understands the directness and sonic impact expected of modern recordings, but he also recognises that the Stones’ power comes from human friction—guitars that scrape against one another, rhythms that move slightly behind the beat and vocals that sound lived-in rather than polished to perfection.
The result is not an attempt to make the Rolling Stones sound young. It is an effort to make them sound alive.
That distinction matters. Foreign Tongues does not recreate the cultural shock of albums such as Sticky Fingers or Exile on Main St., nor could any contemporary Stones record carry the same historical force. But early reviews suggest that it compares favourably with much of the band’s output from later decades, combining familiar musical foundations with a genuine sense of renewed purpose.
Richards remains the symbolic centre of that continuity. His guitar style, built around open tunings, sparse chords and carefully placed silences, has influenced generations of musicians. His survival has also become inseparable from his public mythology, although the older Richards now speaks more about moderation, family and listening to the limits of his body than about the excesses that once defined his image.
The Stones’ new chapter therefore depends on an unusual exchange. Watt supplies speed, discipline and generational distance. Richards, Jagger and Wood provide instinct, history and a musical language developed over a lifetime.
Neither side erases the other. The producer does not transform the Stones into a contemporary pop act, and the band does not use him merely as a technician. Their partnership works because it treats experience and youth not as opposing forces, but as different forms of energy.
After more than six decades, the Rolling Stones’ greatest surprise may no longer be that they are still together. It is that, with the right creative pressure, they still sound as though they have something left to prove.
