'Foreign Tongues' is the funniest Rolling Stones album in decades

Here’s a terrible-seeming idea: The Rolling Stones should get started connected their adjacent album.

Like, now.

After taking astir 2 decades to merchandise 2023’s “Hackney Diamonds” — the band’s archetypal acceptable of archetypal worldly since “A Bigger Bang” successful 2005 — the Stones are backmost this week with a follow-up, “Foreign Tongues,” that took them little than 36 months to get out.

And it’s the amended grounds successful each way.

In the aged days, of course, 2 and a fractional years was each they needed to marque “Beggars Banquet,” “Let It Bleed” and “Sticky Fingers.” So let’s not get excessively carried distant by the information Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood are moving arsenic accelerated arsenic they are successful their precocious 70s and aboriginal 80s.

Yet to perceive to the brisk and sportive “Foreign Tongues” is to perceive a set intelligibly going connected instinct alternatively than overthinking the euphony à la immoderate fig of seasoned acts successful legacy-maintenance mode. I don’t cognize if the effect is the Stones’ champion since 1978’s “Some Girls,” but it’s decidedly the funniest, which is really the much awesome achievement.

“Wake up successful the greeting and you wanna marque maine puke,” Jagger sneers successful the punky “Hit Me successful the Head” — precisely the benignant of lyric you’d anticipation to perceive from a set whose lone imaginable crushed for inactive being successful the crippled is to person a gas-gas-gas.

Like “Hackney Diamonds” — and, for that matter, similar Paul McCartney’s “The Boys of Dungeon Lane” (to sanction 1 caller overthinking-veteran LP) — “Foreign Tongues” was produced by 35-year-old Andrew Watt, who’s made a vocation of helping boomer icons enactment a small radiance connected their late-in-life efforts. And he’s helped the Stones convene an appealingly motley unit of collaborators here, including McCartney (who plays bass connected “Covered successful You”), the Cure’s Robert Smith (who contributes guitar to “Divine Intervention”), Steve Winwood (who plays soft and organ passim the album) and Bruno Mars (who’s credited with, uh, cowbell successful “Never Wanna Lose You”).

You besides get a invited quality from the precocious Charlie Watts successful a hard-thwacking show recorded earlier his decease successful 2021. (Steve Jordan different keeps time.)

But nary of the stunt casting feels similar the constituent of the album, which alternatively simply doles retired a twelve tunes successful the Stones’ assorted idioms — the bluesy stomp, the country-ish lope, the sleazy disco jam — positive a mates of covers successful conscionable implicit an hour. It’s frisky and lighthearted, adjacent erstwhile Jagger is lamenting what helium sees arsenic the atrocious authorities of his beloved America successful “Ringing Hollow” and erstwhile Richards is croaking astir emotion having enactment him connected his knees successful “Some of Us.”

And erstwhile they spell goblin mode, they truly thin in: “Mr. Charm” is simply a demented soul-rock rave-up astir however boring wealth is — OK, Mick — successful which Jagger drops a diss of the “mad mogul Mr. Musk” into a verse laying retired the delights of staying location and doing anagrams.

In “Divine Intervention,” Jagger offers a colorful travelogue of trips done New York and Los Angeles — “I kept moving connected to Silver Lake / To play guitar with a marque caller person of mine” — portion Richards and Wood get their guitars slip-sliding each implicit the place. “Jealous Lover” is gorgeously trashy: a horny small strut that sounds similar “Dirty Mind”-era Prince doing “Waiting connected a Friend.” (Legitimately loony Mick vocal here.)

For God knows what reason, the Stones connection up a faithful rendition of Amy Winehouse’s “You Know I’m No Good” with Jagger connected harmonica. And the medium ends with a precise ragged instrumentality connected Chuck Berry’s “Beautiful Delilah,” evidently meant to punctual you of however the 2 lifers astatine the halfway of the Stones came unneurotic much than fractional a period ago.

The representation is ancient; the thrill, somehow, is alive.