The Rolling Stones turned an album launch into a late-night conversation in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, where Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood appeared with Conan O’Brien to talk about Foreign Tongues, a 14-track LP the band confirmed was coming on July 10. O’Brien opened the evening at The Weylin by calling it “the gig of a lifetime,” then said he had listened to the new album 25 times already.
The event was staged at The Weylin, a domed, churchlike space built in 1875 that long served as a neighborhood bank, and it doubled as the first public push for the record after the band’s July 10 confirmation. The Rolling Stones said the album includes guest spots from Paul McCartney, Robert Smith of The Cure, Steve Winwood and Chad Smith of Red Hot Chili Peppers, along with longtime collaborators Darryl Jones, Matt Clifford and Steve Jordan. Charlie Watts also appears on the album through one of his last recording sessions.
The night leaned as much on stories as on promotion. Jagger laughed off a comparison between his current vocals and his 1968 recordings by saying, “Well, I was taking a lot of drugs in ’68,” and later recalled spotting Robert Smith in London as “this bloke standing there with his back to me with a long gown on,” before adding, “You are Robert Smith of The Cure!” Richards, after O’Brien moved the microphone close to his mouth, shot back, “That’s the Irish in you!” and then bellowed toward producer Andrew Watt, “Andrew, this is the worst echo chamber I’ve ever heard!”
The setting carried its own subtext. The launch took place across the East River from Manhattan, the borough referenced in the Stones’ 1978 song “Shattered,” and the band’s decision to lean on guests and old colleagues suggested a record that reaches backward even as it moves ahead. Watt, who also produced 2023’s Hackney Diamonds, returns here as the guide for a project that folds in one of Watts’ last sessions with Charlie Watts and invites a familiar question: after all these years, the Rolling Stones are still finding new ways to sound like themselves.