Rolling Stones announce Foreign Tongues, star-studded Brooklyn launch draws crowds

The Rolling Stones turned a record announcement into a room-watching event, unveiling Foreign Tongues inside Brooklyn’s converted Williamsburgh Savings Bank while a packed crowd waited for Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood to take the stage. The setting, now known as Weylin, gave the band a gilded backdrop for a campaign built on restraint, surprise and the kind of premium aura that streaming-era releases rarely command.

The album will be the group’s 25th studio record and is scheduled for release on July 10. It will run 14 tracks and includes contributions from Charlie Watts, Paul McCartney, Steve Winwood, Robert Smith and Chad Smith, a guest list that pushed the project beyond nostalgia into full-scale event culture. Conan O’Brien was among those present, and other coverage of the launch also placed Leonardo DiCaprio in the crowd, underscoring how carefully the Stones wrapped music, celebrity and spectacle into a single night.

The band also previewed at least two songs, “In the Stars” and “Rough and Twisted,” while keeping the full shape of the record guarded. Jagger nodded to McCartney’s role with a pointed aside: “I think Paul really wanted to jump in there.” The remark fit the evening’s tone, treating the album less like a routine release than a social happening, with the audience inside the old bank vault-style hall left wanting more.

Foreign Tongues arrived less than three years after 2023’s Hackney Diamonds, the Stones’ first album of original material in 18 years and their first full-length release after Watts died in 2021. Watts also appeared posthumously on Hackney Diamonds, which made the new album’s inclusion of one of his final recording sessions carry extra emotional weight for longtime fans. That connection gave the Brooklyn launch a sharper edge than a standard comeback rollout, tying the Stones’ present to the band’s most enduring legacy.

Recorded in under a month at Metropolis Studios in west London with returning producer Andrew Watt, Foreign Tongues was also paired with artwork by American painter Nathaniel Mary Quinn and is already available for pre-order in multiple formats on the Rolling Stones’ official site. Released through Capitol Records and Polydor, the album showed how veteran acts still control the terms of attention: limit the supply, stage the reveal, bring out the names, and let scarcity do the marketing.